Technology in socialism [Archive]

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oneday

8th October 2015, 00:21

Alet

8th October 2015, 00:31

We are not able to describe a socialist society, for it will be radically different from present conditions. Our job is not to make positive demands, but to negate capitalist society. Personally, I think we would still have computers, internet and some high-tech stuff, as it will help to plan production. However, the use of technology, the people's relation to it will change.

Aslan

8th October 2015, 00:38

the internet is a perfect way to administrate a socialist society. personally I think technology will still be created, its just that there isn't a profit motive. We can see this in the case of Cuba inventing the cure for mother-to-child HIV. Innovation contrary to bourgeois propaganda isn't for the sake of money.

So yes, instead of technology serving the capitalist. It will serve humanity as an instrument for our success.

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

8th October 2015, 00:39

I don't think it's possible to predict technological change with any accuracy, as by definition we can't know about future scientific discoveries. The most we can do is extrapolate from current trends - i.e. we will probably have fusion reactors and more efficient fission ones (and people will hopefully stop panicking about fusion).

As for how changes in the relations of production will impact the sort of technologies we already have, obviously things like planned obsolescence will become a thing of the past, along with any other feature of existing technology that serves to bolster the rate of profit without offering any benefit to the producer or consumer. Likewise, automation will increase as the socialist society has no interest in keeping a favourable organic composition of capital. As for smartphones, no, I don't think anyone will have to give them up. I don't like them (I don't like tablets, either, and a smartphone is a low-end tablet crossed with a low-end phone), but a lot of people seem to, so there is obviously some demand for the things.

(People were "alienated", in the colloquial sense, even before smartphones. That sort of alienation is not all bad, either.)

Alet

8th October 2015, 01:00

I don't like them [...] but a lot of people seem to, so there is obviously some demand for the things.

Yes, but why do they? It's not an inherent impulse or a timeless need, as demand is neither determined by genes nor a result of free choice. People's desires will change, as society will change. We cannot say that they will want smart phones in communism just because they want them today. This is like saying people will drive Lamborghinis and wear Gucci outfits because there is demand for these today. You could also argue that people in communism would want to oppress others because you can observe this phenomenon today. Maybe you are even right and people will still have smart phones but not for the reason you gave. Instead, their relation to smart phones will be of a very different nature just as their reasons to demand them will be very different.

ComradeAllende

8th October 2015, 01:04

We are told that capitalism is a system that chooses it's own technological development. When humans are in control of the development directly, what will be the outcome? Which technologies would be abandon or change? Should I be ready to ditch my smartphone as a symbol of spectacular alienation? What types of new technologies would come about?

Technically speaking, capitalism doesn't choose technological development; it's quite literally forced upon it. In order to stave off stagnation and preserve profits, capitalists must invest heavily in new technology lest the competitors gain an advantage and/or the workers get too "uppity" with their demands (see the rise of automation as a tool to repress workers' demands).

Well, I don't presume to have any detailed knowledge on the developmental pattern of a socialist society, but I would suggest that (assuming scarcity is still a factor) we would prioritize technological growth in areas of basic need: medicine, transportation, energy, etc. That's not to say that consumer industries would suffer; the dreary ration lines in Stalinist and neo-Stalinist Russia are not something we should look forward to in the near-term. It's just that less emphasis would be placed on consumer gadgets (smartphones, apps, etc) and more emphasis would be placed on more material needs. Again, this is all speculation, and entirely subject to the democratic will of the workers.

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

8th October 2015, 01:07

Yes, but why do they? It's not an inherent impulse or a timeless need, as demand is neither determined by genes nor a result of free choice. People's desires will change, as society will change. We cannot say that they will want smart phones in communism just because they want them today. This is like saying people will drive Lamborghinis and wear Gucci outfits because there is demand for these today. You could also argue that people in communism would want to oppress others because you can observe this phenomenon today. Maybe you are even right and people will still have smart phones but not for the reason you gave. Instead, their relation to smart phones will be of a very different nature just as their reasons to demand them will be very different.

A Lamborghini is a particular brand of car. I assume that, in socialism, the former factories of Automobili Lamborghini S.P.A. will continue to produce cars. And there will still be demand for cars, for suits, and presumably for smartphones. Why would there not be? When it comes to things like "oppression" (itself vague), we can state why such things will no longer exist in socialism. But for suits? Why would there no longer be a demand for suits? Particularly since socialism is a real possibility at the present moment; it's not something that will happen centuries in the future.

Alet

8th October 2015, 01:26

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

8th October 2015, 01:34

Indeed, "oppression" is very vague, but the argument is the same. Present desires are irrelevant to a communist society because present standards are not future standards. Of course, I cannot explain why demand for certain things would cease to exist, but my question is: why should it not? Consumption is not the free will of some kind of autonomous individuals, it is provoked by the mode of production itself and its social order. "People want it today" is not an argument because it ignores the reasons for their wants and the effects of their consumption.

No, I don't think the argument is same at all. We can say homophobia will not exist in socialism as the family, the manner in which a class of dispossessed direct producers is reproduced in capitalism, will not exist. But why would the demand for suits not exist? You're not telling us. Talking about "autonomous individuals" is a red herring. No one is saying that consumption is due to some liberum arbitrium. It is grounded in the biological, technical and cultural life of the species. But it is not directly caused by the mode of production. In fact which objects are use-values and which are not changes far more slowly than the relations of production do. Milk for example has been a use-value for a part of the human species across several sets of relations of production. Arsenic has been a use-value since the early classless society, and so on.

N. Senada

8th October 2015, 01:39

Indeed, "oppression" is very vague, but the argument is the same. Present desires are irrelevant to a communist society because present standards are not future standards. Of course, I cannot explain why demand for certain things would cease to exist, but my question is: why should it not? Consumption is not the free will of some kind of autonomous individuals, it is provoked by the mode of production itself and its social order. "People want it today" is not an argument because it ignores the reasons for their wants and the effects of their consumption.

By the way, future standard will not came out of nowhere.
The generation who will live in a proletariat dictatorship and then in a communist society must recokon first of all with itself and you will not have a blank paper to handle with, but centuries of layers of the wastes that capitalism laid on our shoulders.

Communism is not a rabbit out of an hat, but the material transformation of the society, which means the material transformation of the lives of billions of human being.

Alet

8th October 2015, 02:21

No, I don't think the argument is same at all. We can say homophobia will not exist in socialism as the family, the manner in which a class of dispossessed direct producers is reproduced in capitalism, will not exist. But why would the demand for suits not exist? You're not telling us.

Because this is a question I cannot answer. There could be a demand for suits just as there could be none. I am not a fortune teller, the only answer I could possibly give you is an abstract one: because there might be no reasons. But if there are reasons, it's not that their capitalist ancestors worshipped their aesthetics. The "red herring" is owed to the fact that you do not give the reasons for consumption by yourself. Also, that certain use values have been consumed throughout different modes of production does not change the fact that consciousness is coerced by society, and so is demand.

By the way, future standard will not came out of nowhere.
The generation who will live in a proletariat dictatorship and then in a communist society must recokon first of all with itself and you will not have a blank paper to handle with, but centuries of layers of the wastes that capitalism laid on our shoulders.

Communism is not a rabbit out of an hat, but the material transformation of the society, which means the material transformation of the lives of billions of human being.

Nobody claims that communism is "a rabbit out of an hat", and I do not need to assume this to argue that demands will change. The point is this, you cannot just separate demand from social order because demand itself is a product of the latter. It is very simple: If the reasons for consumption cease to exist, consumption will cease to exist. Capitalism creates different reasons because they are necessary for its reproduction. That there are luxuries and status symbols is owed to what? If I'm not allowed to make use of "red herrings", tell me. You cannot prattle about a solidary, atheist society free from alienation and at the same time expect it to print bibles just because Christian ideologues like to have one today. And smart phones might cease to exist just as well regardless of present desires.

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

8th October 2015, 12:17

Because this is a question I cannot answer. There could be a demand for suits just as there could be none. I am not a fortune teller, the only answer I could possibly give you is an abstract one: because there might be no reasons. But if there are reasons, it's not that their capitalist ancestors worshipped their aesthetics. The "red herring" is owed to the fact that you do not give the reasons for consumption by yourself. Also, that certain use values have been consumed throughout different modes of production does not change the fact that consciousness is coerced by society, and so is demand.

I don't think the onus is on me, here. We are talking about socialism as it would exist after the socialist revolution in the near future, surely, as that is the only sort of socialism that is of any relevance to us (I say this because many people on RL apparently think socialism will happen in a few centuries); as such it makes sense to assume any demand not directly connected to capitalism (insurance, for example) will continue. Besides, in most cases it is very clear why certain objects are use-values. Smartphones for example are useful to people who want to connect to the Internet on the go, but find tablets impractical. Do you think any of that will change in socialism? I also think a lot of criticisms of smartphone technology is essentially reactionary - it romanticises former face-to-face communication and the communities that capitalism is progressively destroying.

I also don't think it makes sense to say that demand is coerced by society. There is nothing to coerce; rather demand organically arises from the facts of human life. But in most cases, demand exists logically prior to the mode of production, which is how society organises to produce the necessities of human life. Only in certain situations does the mode of production create new use-values, and these are only useful to ensure the production of more immediate needs.

The Garbage Disposal Unit

8th October 2015, 16:14

Personally, I'm excited to see technological development along less "high tech" lines - the proliferation of permaculture techniques, neighbourhood-based accounting/distribution systems, small-scale electrical generation of various sorts (small hydro, manual, etc.).
And I'm interested in the ways this might intersect with "high tech" development. For example, one of my roommates is a chemist, currently working in a lab under the lead of a researcher who clams he won't retire until he's produced a battery that can retain 100% charge for 50 years. Which, y'know, even if they get half way there, it will vastly change the scope of what can be accomplished with relatively small scale electric generation.

Anyway, my comment is a bit "flight of fancy" but I wanted to say something, because I really appreciate the framing of this thread - imagining technology not as a linear (or exponential) growth in a direction from "less" to "more", but as a political question, informed by particular sets of needs created by given social circumstances.

I'd really love to live in a world in which the need for nuclear power didn't exist.

-=56=-

8th October 2015, 16:24

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

8th October 2015, 21:40

Emmett Till

8th October 2015, 23:24

Because this is a question I cannot answer. There could be a demand for suits just as there could be none. I am not a fortune teller, the only answer I could possibly give you is an abstract one: because there might be no reasons. But if there are reasons, it's not that their capitalist ancestors worshipped their aesthetics. The "red herring" is owed to the fact that you do not give the reasons for consumption by yourself. Also, that certain use values have been consumed throughout different modes of production does not change the fact that consciousness is coerced by society, and so is demand.

Nobody claims that communism is "a rabbit out of an hat", and I do not need to assume this to argue that demands will change. The point is this, you cannot just separate demand from social order because demand itself is a product of the latter. It is very simple: If the reasons for consumption cease to exist, consumption will cease to exist. Capitalism creates different reasons because they are necessary for its reproduction. That there are luxuries and status symbols is owed to what? If I'm not allowed to make use of "red herrings", tell me. You cannot prattle about a solidary, atheist society free from alienation and at the same time expect it to print bibles just because Christian ideologues like to have one today. And smart phones might cease to exist just as well regardless of present desires.

Smart phones will cease to exist, whether in a capitalist or socialist society, until some better more hi-tech more convenient methods of long distance communication are developed. This will likely happen quicker in a socialist society than in a capitalist.

As for suits, well, the need for comfortable good looking clothing will persist, at least in nontropical countries, as humans are not fur-bearing animals. Whether what people wear can be described as "suits" is besides the point, that is what we cannot predict.

Only the prosperous engage in "conspicuous consumption" to "keep up with the Joneses." Most of the human race are broke, and therefore buy things when they need them. Granted, capitalist advertising tries to make people believe they need things when they don't, and it is powerful. But it only works when it persuades people that they actually need the products.

Consumption happens because it is necessary, whatever the nature of society. And, until humans start uploading their minds to computers, it will always be necessary. Even then, you'll need electrical juice and some really powerful virus protection software!

Alet

9th October 2015, 01:00

Smart phones will cease to exist, whether in a capitalist or socialist society, until some better more hi-tech more convenient methods of long distance communication are developed.

This is an assumption, and I dare to ask you to actually prove it. However, this discussion is not about whether there will be smart phones or not. I'm attacking Xhar-Xhar's argument "there is demand for it, so there will be" because, whatever the demand, it is neither timeless nor always of the same nature. Even if a communist society would produce smart phones because "there is demand for it", people will probably use them for very different reasons compared to people today, losing themselves in stupid Facebook videos and stuff. It might very well be possible that its utility will be reduced to long distance communication, which does not even require high-tech.

As for suits, well, the need for comfortable good looking clothing will persist, at least in nontropical countries, as humans are not fur-bearing animals. Whether what people wear can be described as "suits" is besides the point [...]

No, this is not besides the point, this is actually important. You are admitting that the form of consumption can (and does) change. The question is, why can/does it? You cannot answer "It's imposed by society" without considering that smart phones might cease to exist, because a different society creates different conditions - conditions, which might make smart phones useless or even harmful to the reproduction of their society. But desires are products of social environment, therefore "currently there is demand for it" is not an argument as a communist society is very different from present society.

Most of the human race are broke, and therefore buy things when they need them. Granted, capitalist advertising tries to make people believe they need things when they don't, and it is powerful. But it only works when it persuades people that they actually need the products.

Advertising is only the most obvious example. What does it mean to "need" something? Who are you to decide which things people need and which they don't? People need the newest vacuum cleaner™ no less than capitalists need diamonds in their golden watches or than humans in non tropical regions need, well, "comfortable good looking clothing". All of these are impositions, and all of these reproduce the present state.

Consumption happens because it is necessary, whatever the nature of society. And, until humans start uploading their minds to computers, it will always be necessary. Even then, you'll need electrical juice and some really powerful virus protection software!

You're missing the point. Of course, consumption is necessary, but this statement does not explain consumption. For example, the possession of gold chains is radically different from drinking water. The former is a ritual, an expression of people's relation to their mode of production, while the latter is a reproduction on a biological level. Humans will always drink water, at least if they want to exist. But a classless society will remove the bases for rituals like wearing gold chains.

ckaihatsu

9th October 2015, 05:31

I think one main thing that's always missing from these discussions about technological possibilities / modalities is the *layout*, or 'scale' of technological provisioning, and access -- consider that perhaps one crucial factor for why smartphones is now the dominant form factor for technology usage, is because of the monolithic institution of *private property*. It's imperative that people 'keep an eye on their shit' in this society because otherwise it (their smartphone) would probably be *swiped* by someone if they left it unattended.

So the 'smartphone' form factor is best suited to this hyper-individuated mode of socialization that we're used to, where *portability* is paramount -- it's only fairly recently that computing technology has become powerful enough to be as portable as it's now become, and so now it's finally 'individually' useful and empowering. (Computing technology itself, of course, has existed for decades and was used in other-socialized social modalities, as in government and academia, for example.)

In a *socialist* society I'd estimate that access to computational resources would be far freer, with processors being linked together almost commonly, for truly limitless 'grid computing' as the default, instead of the one-processor (multi-core), per device standard that prevails today. (In other words why wouldn't *all* processors in existence comprise *one* distributed mainframe, for everyone in the world -- ?)

The *access* to such computing could be far freer as well, with more of a general 'library' mode, where terminals are virtually *everywhere* (like wifi today), for people to step-up-to, to get at their personal online accounts and environments.

I think we've become very acclimated to the idea that personal technology is for a very circumscribed, *personal* sphere of usage, and that computational resources are somehow necessarily limited to that same sphere -- in a more-open, better-socialized society, computation would become as available and accessible -- for more-imaginative directions -- as we expect everything else to become, like industrial productivity and the public domain in general.

Lord Testicles

9th October 2015, 10:53

I don't even own a smartphone. Seems like I am going to have to obtain one from poor Syrian 'refugees' and that 5k euros they carry on them sure looks neat as well.

Yeah, people can't be refugees if they own a phone and have some savings. Don't people know that when a war ravages a country all the bank accounts are set to £0.00 and all the technology evaporates.

How about you engage your brain before you fucking come back and post here?

Armchair Partisan

9th October 2015, 11:11

I don't even own a smartphone. Seems like I am going to have to obtain one from poor Syrian 'refugees' and that 5k euros they carry on them sure looks neat as well.

The refugees you see here are the ones who have managed to sell all their spare belongings, pool their life savings, just to get barely enough money to pay the human traffickers to ferry them west. The poorest of the poor, those who are in the direst situation, never have a chance of making it beyond the first Turkish refugee camp.

By the way, the refugees I've heard about only have a few hundred euros left on them, at most, by the time they come to Hungary or thereabouts.

-=56=-

10th October 2015, 20:46

Yeah, people can't be refugees if they own a phone and have some savings.

Wait, this doesn't make me a refugee, for I do not own a phone nor keep monies in savings bank. This neccesitates me to fight for my own country as well. Phew. You had me scared there for a moment.

Don't people know that when a war ravages a country all the bank accounts are set to £0.00 and all the technology evaporates.

That means I am in a state of war. No wonder, for I was born during martial law. Nothing is forever and forever is nothing.

How about you engage your brain before you fucking come back and post here?

Ehh, okay, I will, but don't scream at me, please...

The refugees you see here are the ones who have managed to sell all their spare belongings, pool their life savings, just to get barely enough money to pay the human traffickers to ferry them west. The poorest of the poor, those who are in the direst situation, never have a chance of making it beyond the first Turkish refugee camp.

Okay, if they're the poorest of the poor, I wonder what are the richest of the rich doing right now. Do not tell me they grew some balls and are fighting alonsgides Kurdish women.

By the way, the refugees I've heard about only have a few hundred euros left on them, at most, by the time they come to Hungary or thereabouts.

Noted.

Lord Testicles

10th October 2015, 20:49

Fuck off you moron.

(I know, I know, no flaming, but this guy is clearly an idiot.)

ckaihatsu

11th October 2015, 02:59

Also see:

In A Nut Shell

http://www.revleft.com/vb/nut-shell-t194231/index.html

LuÃs Henrique

13th October 2015, 12:43

A Lamborghini is a particular brand of car. I assume that, in socialism, the former factories of Automobili Lamborghini S.P.A. will continue to produce cars. And there will still be demand for cars, for suits, and presumably for smartphones. Why would there not be? When it comes to things like "oppression" (itself vague), we can state why such things will no longer exist in socialism. But for suits? Why would there no longer be a demand for suits? Particularly since socialism is a real possibility at the present moment; it's not something that will happen centuries in the future.

Lamborghini produces luxury cars - cars that are not just means of transportation, but means of asserting social status. I am not sure of what will happen to Lamborghini SPA, besides being expropriated and run by its workers, but it seems problematic to assume that there will be a demand for means of asserting social status in a socialist society.

Same goes for suits - people will in all likelyhood still want to be dressed, and it is possible that they will want to be dressed in suits - though it is also possible that they will prefer togas or tunics. Perhaps there is even going to be a renewed demand for powdered periwigs.

But I suppose that the Giorgio Armani brand will lose a lot of its present charm.

Cars (though perhaps not exactly Lamborghinis) are also means of transportation intended to nuclear families:

https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ4PCGRoHntWA2RjqpFX2jofZ5spEuo4 Hru7yzjvtzpASRPZ_znOQ

If nuclear families go out of favour, it is possible that cars follow suit, or will at least have to be radically redefined.

But point is, the production of means of consumption in a socialist society should be subjected to public discussion. "Demand" in this case shouldn't be imagined as merely individual whims. Mass production of automobiles demands a whole public infrastructure that is beggining to epically fail; a socialist society will have to rethink that, and that could very well mean the end of both demand and production of wheeled familial transporters.

Cars could very well "wither away", together with religion, nuclear families, and the State.

On the other hand, the authoritarian idea that we will have a revolution and forbid automobiles (or smartphones, or suits, or wellies) the next day because they are "bourgeois" is quite foolish. We will have to expropriate the factories first, then organise them into a coherent productive system, before we can earnestly begin to "demand" things in a new, more advanced, socialist way.

Luís Henrique

LuÃs Henrique

13th October 2015, 12:47

Guardia Rossa

13th October 2015, 13:40

ckaihatsu

13th October 2015, 21:48

LuÃs Henrique

15th October 2015, 16:28

If we can assume that people will be doing *some* kinds of work in a post-capitalist- / socialist-type society, I'd say that *that* would be sufficient for some kind of a 'social status' to exist, whether we would like to see it or not.

I am pretty sure that status won't "wither away". But status in a capitalist society is expressed by commodities; in a communist society that would be impossible.

Consider that some necessarily-socially-necessary work might wind up being more *prominent*, or *well-known*, maybe just incidentally and not even from any premeditated intention or planning -- that, then, would be a sufficient basis for an emergent 'tribal', post-primitive-communism kind of communistic social status.

Or, in other words, status in a communist society will be expressed by what you do - if you are a great poet, that adds to your status; if you are a lousy second-baseman, that decract from you status. But having a Lamborghini, even supposing that they would still be produced, would mean nothing, status-wise.

The more interesting question here would be how *egocentric* people may or may not get as a result of this type of unintended notoreity -- would people then *want* Lamborghinis as a material reward or reinforcement of their newfound status -- ?

This would only be possible to the extent that Lamborghinis could actually express status. In a capitalist society, having a Lamborghini directly means you are rich, and being rich will directly boost your status - as a presumptive member of the ruling class. But in a communist society, having a Lamborghini cannot mean that you are rich, much less a member of the ruling class.

So what would the point be? If you were an outstanding physician, your status would be directly linked to that fact; it wouldn't have to be mediated by a Lamborghini (or any other commodity, of course).

I'm going to play the 'aesthetics' card here, nonetheless, and say that people who *like* Lamborghinis will be the ones who *want* them -- and the technical-geek type, too, of course.

But what makes people "like" Lamborghinis? Yes, there is an aesthetical aspect to it. But I find Spitfires beautiful planes (and beautiful killing machines):

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/multimedia/dynamic/00238/spitfire_238164k.jpg

That doesn't make me "want" a Spitfire.

As much as I love comrades and shit, I'm going to have to point out the perennial groupthink blind-spot, which is the logistical *practicalities* of any given technical device, like that of a car. Until some clearly *superior*, individualistic-type vehicle comes about that definitively *supersedes* the automobile -- as laptops or tablets have done to the conventional tower computer -- I'm going to go with them still being around in some incarnation, presumably electric.

I think that automobiles have a somewhat inverse problem. It is not that they need to be superceded by something better; it is that they are becoming so obviously bad - as means of transportation - that they will be superceded by... bicycles (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQ-gqrmYUsg), if something unusual doesn't happen that can revamp their utility.

Luís Henrique

ckaihatsu

15th October 2015, 21:19

I am pretty sure that status won't "wither away". But status in a capitalist society is expressed by commodities; in a communist society that would be impossible.

But what if one could exhibit a kind of self-expression through one's *possessions* -- ?

For the sake of argument let's say that one *created* all of these, from scratch. Maybe they happen to be marvels of design and/or engineering to the point where some *journalist* type covers this person and their possessions out of sheer interest and winds up inadvertently popularizing their work or collection to where they become world-famous. They become a household name, and achieve a social status of notoreity that even a flood couldn't wash away.

Or, perhaps of a lesser type, maybe someone has personal possessions of some *historical* value -- perhaps in a niche cultural interest -- that wouldn't be *museum*-worthy for full collectivization, but would be made available to the public in some capacity, and their name would forever be associated with this unique historical collection.

Or, in other words, status in a communist society will be expressed by what you do - if you are a great poet, that adds to your status; if you are a lousy second-baseman, that decract from you status. But having a Lamborghini, even supposing that they would still be produced, would mean nothing, status-wise.

Hmmmm, I wouldn't be so certain about that -- in line with the above, perhaps someone's 'greatness' is in their collection of high-performance cars (or high-level *whatever*, really), and maybe they're not so much a great *academic* about cars as much as they're a great *maintainer* of them.

(Would a communist society arbitrarily draw the line somewhere, to say that a *wine* collection is okay but a *car* collection isn't -- ?)

This would only be possible to the extent that Lamborghinis could actually express status. In a capitalist society, having a Lamborghini directly means you are rich, and being rich will directly boost your status - as a presumptive member of the ruling class. But in a communist society, having a Lamborghini cannot mean that you are rich, much less a member of the ruling class.

I'd welcome elaboration on this point -- assuming that Lambos, or any cultural equivalent, would continue to exist beyond capitalism, what exactly would be the criteria for one to claim 'possession' of something that might be so high-level (in physical qualities and uniqueness) -- ?

So what would the point be? If you were an outstanding physician, your status would be directly linked to that fact; it wouldn't have to be mediated by a Lamborghini (or any other commodity, of course).

Hey, don't ask *me* (grin)....

I'm not, and probably wouldn't be, in this category -- it would be on a case-by-case basis, anyway, but, depending on the individual, one could certainly conceivably seek to bolster their newfound organic social status with a definitively upscale-directed change in lifestyle.

But what makes people "like" Lamborghinis? Yes, there is an aesthetical aspect to it. But I find Spitfires beautiful planes (and beautiful killing machines):

[IMG]http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/multimedia/dynamic/00238/spitfire_238164k.jpg[IMG]

That doesn't make me "want" a Spitfire.

Yeah, but that's *you* -- you're attempting to generalize *all individual behavior* according to your *own* predilections.

What if someone happened to be almost 100% like you, except that they *wanted* to possess a Spitfire -- ?

I think that automobiles have a somewhat inverse problem. It is not that they need to be superceded by something better; it is that they are becoming so obviously bad - as means of transportation - that they will be superceded by... bicycles (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQ-gqrmYUsg), if something unusual doesn't happen that can revamp their utility.

I happened to be ruminating on this today, and thought that perhaps someone could develop a bicycle with special gearing that would enable the rider to reach speeds of 60+ mph.... Maybe *that* would do it...(!)

This, btw, is precisely the 'blind spot' that I speak of, that comrades often have -- it's nice to have one's own opinions and such, but any attempt to *generalize* that arbitrary personal opinion into *active theory* just inevitably falls flat and looks amateurish. (No offense.)

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

16th October 2015, 00:20

Lamborghini produces luxury cars - cars that are not just means of transportation, but means of asserting social status. I am not sure of what will happen to Lamborghini SPA, besides being expropriated and run by its workers, but it seems problematic to assume that there will be a demand for means of asserting social status in a socialist society.

Lamborghini, I am led to believe (I don't drive myself as I don't have the nerves for it), produces quality cars. These cars also function as luxury items (although possibly not as luxury items in the strict sense in which Marx uses that term, as I understand it is possible for a worker to buy a Lamborghini), a function that will obviously not exist in socialism. But the need for quality cars will still exists. It is possible that an object will lose one function in socialism and retain other functions - i.e. whatever handcuffs are produced in socialism, I highly doubt they will be produced for police use.

Now, what does it mean for the social function of luxury to disappear? As RevLeft gathers many young liberals, disgusted at the decadence and emptiness of modern life, the suggestion is often floated of banning luxury items and anything considered a luxury item, with many a paragraph of neurotic prose being dedicated to squaring the circle of a classless society banning something. As you yourself note, this is extraordinarily stupid. What abolishes luxury is precisely free access. As everyone can have an automobile of the same quality as Lamborghini cars of today, if not better, then having such an automobile ceases to signify anything.

Automobili Lamborghini S.P.A. will, of course, not exist in socialism. The factories of the former company, too, will not be "run by their workers". They will be run by society, according to a scientific plan. Autogestion is simply workers' capitalism.

Same goes for suits - people will in all likelyhood still want to be dressed, and it is possible that they will want to be dressed in suits - though it is also possible that they will prefer togas or tunics. Perhaps there is even going to be a renewed demand for powdered periwigs.

Perhaps togas will become popular again, in a century or so. This seems to be the time span required for such a radical change in consumption patterns when it comes to clothes. I doubt that they will - as among other things togas are grossly impractical in the context of modern life. That is besides the point, however. The only socialism that we can meaningfully discuss is the socialism that is possible now. Now, people wear suits, many people are habituated to wearing them and the claim that their consumption patterns will change on short notice without any real reason is not convincing.

It is of course possible that some people think socialism will happen after a few centuries, probably either after the invention of the mystical nanotechnology that will make human labour obsolete, or after centuries of "socialist" (social-democratic) bourgeois governments, but that is not only a gross distortion of Marxism, it makes talking about such socialism entirely pointless. Unless serious discussion is less important to them than speculation. In either case I despair; the speculation is not even good speculation.

But I suppose that the Giorgio Armani brand will lose a lot of its present charm.

I don't think it is possible for brands to exist in socialism at all, the Armani brand not excluded. Even if - and that's a big if - we ignore the abolition of money and the market, which provide the context in which brands operate - standardisation is an important part of socialist production.

Cars (though perhaps not exactly Lamborghinis) are also means of transportation intended to nuclear families:

https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ4PCGRoHntWA2RjqpFX2jofZ5spEuo4 Hru7yzjvtzpASRPZ_znOQ

If nuclear families go out of favour, it is possible that cars follow suit, or will at least have to be radically redefined.

Socialism means the abolition of the family, not just the "nuclear" variant but the entire institution. That said, even if the car was "intended" for nuclear families (I don't think it's particularly important to dissect the origin of the car here), they have found use outside that situation. They would still be use-values after the abolition of the family, for situations in which it is necessary to cross distances we can expect in or between the socialist cities, without having to wait for public transport.

But point is, the production of means of consumption in a socialist society should be subjected to public discussion. "Demand" in this case shouldn't be imagined as merely individual whims. Mass production of automobiles demands a whole public infrastructure that is beggining to epically fail; a socialist society will have to rethink that, and that could very well mean the end of both demand and production of wheeled familial transporters.

And I think the point is wrong. Demand it what it is. Much of it comes from individual decisions, or as you derisively say whims. Whether we agree with it or understand it is besides the point. I don't understand why others demand football broadcasts, and other disapprove of the demand for e.g. gay pornography. But demand is demand. It can either be suppressed, which requires some sort of state apparatus at the very least, or it can be taken as it is. The socialist approach is the latter one - demand being such and such, the chief task of the socialist society is the technical task of matching production and distribution to demand. This includes the infrastructural component. To introduce too much discussion in the carrying out of this technical task is, I think, a democratoid error.

Labour hours can only be wasted in a capitalist economy.

That is obviously not the case. If a neolithic producer had tried to make a stone tool from scratch rather than using imported cores, they would have been wasting their labour-time. Money, and more generally value, can only be wasted in capitalist society, that is true, as value does not exist under socialism. But labour-time, divorced from value, is simply another quantity associated with production. And at the end of the day, there are only so many hours that someone is alive. If that time is spent building, maintaining and working at grossly inefficient (in material terms) local projects, less time is available for cultural and scientific life - precisely what is necessary to break from local cretinism.

ckaihatsu

16th October 2015, 21:32

I'll just drop the other shoe here and note that I developed a comprehensive approach / treatment for the whole 'redistribution of wealth' thing -- it's called 'additive prioritizations', and would be appropriate for *any* item or collection (Lamborghinis, Spitfire planes, wine collections, etc.) that would be 'up for grabs' once capitalism and private property is annihilated....

Better, I think, would be an approach that is more routine and less time-sensitive in prioritizing among responders -- the thing that would differentiate demand would be people's *own* prioritizations, in relation to *all other* possibilities for demands. This means that only those most focused on Product 'X' or Event 'Y', to the abandonment of all else (relatively speaking), over several iterations (days), would be seen as 'most-wanting' of it, for ultimate receipt.

My 'communist supply and demand' model, fortunately, uses this approach as a matter of course:

consumption [demand] -- Every person in a locality has a standard, one-through-infinity ranking system of political demands available to them, updated daily

consumption [demand] -- Basic human needs will be assigned a higher political priority by individuals and will emerge as mass demands at the cumulative scale -- desires will benefit from political organizing efforts and coordination

consumption [demand] -- A regular, routine system of mass individual political demand pooling -- as with spreadsheet templates and email -- must be in continuous operation so as to aggregate cumulative demands into the political process

http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?b=1174

I'm also realizing that this model / method of demand-prioritization can be used in such a way as to lend relative *weight* to a person's bid for any given product or calendar event, if there happens to be a limited supply and a more-intensive prioritization ('rationing') is called-for by the objective situation:

Since everyone has a standard one-through-infinity template to use on a daily basis for all political and/or economic demands, this template lends itself to consumer-political-type *organizing* in the case that such is necessary -- someone's 'passion' for a particular demand could be formally demonstrated by their recruiting of *others* to direct one or several of *their* ranking slots, for as many days / iterations as they like, to the person who is trying to beat-out others for the limited quantity.

Recall:

[A]ggregating these lists, by ranking (#1, #2, #3, etc.), is *no big deal* for any given computer. What we would want to see is what the rankings are for milk and steel, by rank position. So how many people put 'milk' for #1 -- ? How many people put 'steel' for #1 -- ? How many people put 'milk' for #2 -- ? And how many people put 'steel' for #2 -- ? (Etc.)

*This* would be socially useful information that could be the whole basis for a socialist political economy.

So, by extension, if someone was particularly interested in 'Event Y', they might undertake efforts to convince others to *donate* their ranking slots to them, forgoing 'milk' and 'steel' (for example) for positions #1 and/or #2. Formally these others would put 'Person Z for Event Y' for positions 1 and/or 2, etc., for as many days / iterations as they might want to donate. This, in effect, would be a populist-political-type campaign, of whatever magnitude, for the sake of a person's own particularly favored consumption preferences, given an unavoidably limited supply of it, whatever it may be.

http://tinyurl.com/additive-prioritizations

LuÃs Henrique

18th October 2015, 13:16

double, mangled post.

Sorry.

LuÃs Henrique

18th October 2015, 15:00

Lamborghini, I am led to believe (I don't drive myself as I don't have the nerves for it), produces quality cars. These cars also function as luxury items (although possibly not as luxury items in the strict sense in which Marx uses that term, as I understand it is possible for a worker to buy a Lamborghini), a function that will obviously not exist in socialism. But the need for quality cars will still exists.

Well.

This is a Lamborghini:

http://cdn.corlate.co/2015/10/12/lamborghinigallardo-l-4974542d2a4122c1.jpg

While I have little doubt that it is indeed a "quality car", I don't think workers can buy it.

Speculation on what things will be produced in a communist society is almost always idle. We are men and women who have been raised and educated under capitalism, which means under the "general light" of bourgeois ideology. And we will probably be unable to cast votes on what is going to be produced in a communist society, unless perchance the odd habit of allowing the dead to vote somehow makes its way into communism.

And it can be worse than idle, if and when people don't realise that it is an idle discussion, and seek to legislate the future, or to make of their poorly thought ideas about "luxury" politically programatic points, echoing "reactionary socialism" points about the unholy consumption habits of the rich, taking scarcity as granted, instead of a historical feature that is ripe for being removed.

So, this is an idle discussion, or, at best, it is a discussion that may allow us to sharp our wits, both in a general way, and in the way of making us clearer in our appreciation of the workings of capitalist societies. If we keep it at this, and abstain from making anarcho-stalinist provisions for the abolishment of the production and the criminalisation of the consumption of gold, automobiles, or computers, I think we can have this discussion without much harming the prospects of revolution.

It is possible that an object will lose one function in socialism and retain other functions - i.e. whatever handcuffs are produced in socialism, I highly doubt they will be produced for police use.

That's more or less appliable to most commodities use-values, though I still think there is a gradation that goes from things that are quite probably continue to be produced in communism, at least in its first stages, like bread, for instance, to things like dreadnoughts, the necessity of which seems more doubtful. Handcuffs can be used for kinky sexual fantasies, at least, which I don't necessarily think is the case of dreadnoughts (but even then, I don't know what part of handcuff fantasies are linked to their merely material role as a restraining device (which could be easily replaced by ropes, for instance) and what part are directly linked with the social role of the police; if the latter is what really turns people on, then the use of handcuffs as sexual toys may be harmed by the abolition of police).

Now, what does it mean for the social function of luxury to disappear?
[snip]
What abolishes luxury is precisely free access. As everyone can have an automobile of the same quality as Lamborghini cars of today, if not better, then having such an automobile ceases to signify anything.

What abolishes luxury is precisely free access, no doubt. But some use-values negate the idea of free access by themselves, and I am going to say that automobiles are among those. If there is free access to automobiles, in the way we are acquainted to think of automobiles and access to them, then the planet becomes an uninhabitable place, plagued by machinery moving at 8 km/h (that's 5 mph, for the decimal impaired) and "wasting labour hours". Which is more or less what we are starting to get under capitalism as of now. And so, it is possible that the whole function of automobiles needs to be revamped; they are not a solution for mass urban transportation, much on the contrary; if they are useful, they will have to be useful in a different way (and the relation between people and automobiles will need to change; the idea of "my" automobile is untenable, even if we understand the difference between personal property and private property; if there are going to be automobiles in a communist society, they will have to be at the disposal of the public, not of individual drivers).

And of course, the usefulness of automobiles is predicated on the weird idea that we don't work where we dwell, and don't dwell where we work, and that those two places are of necessity placed at an unwalkable distance from one another. Which seems one of those things that it is unlikely to be kept from capitalism into a communist society.

Automobili Lamborghini S.P.A. will, of course, not exist in socialism. The factories of the former company, too, will not be "run by their workers". They will be run by society, according to a scientific plan. Autogestion is simply workers' capitalism.

They will be run by society at large, no doubt, though I also realise that in a transitional period they will be likely be run "by their workers", while workers in them and other working places organise to assemble "scientific plans" to harmonise the outputs of different use-values in coherent ways (in the case of Lamborghini I fear this will necessitate a complete revamping of the factory, in order to produce very different cars, or different use-values, or even a complete abandonment of the factory). In any case the scientific plan cannot be directed by consumption whims; it must be guided by a "holistic" (I know, the word gives me the creeps too, but...) comprehension of the necessities of social reproduction.

Perhaps togas will become popular again, in a century or so. This seems to be the time span required for such a radical change in consumption patterns when it comes to clothes. I doubt that they will - as among other things togas are grossly impractical in the context of modern life. That is besides the point, however.

Yeah, I don't think there is a brilliant future for togas either, and they are impractical, and this is besides the point. (But perhaps people in a communist society will like impractical dresses, who knows. And this would be the point, who knows.)

The only socialism that we can meaningfully discuss is the socialism that is possible now. Now, people wear suits, many people are habituated to wearing them and the claim that their consumption patterns will change on short notice without any real reason is not convincing.

It isn't, and I certainly think that workers in suit factories should keep producing suits the day-after of revolution, even though I am also pretty sure that in such day-after there is not going to be any "scientific plan" for the production of suits (or any other use-values, indeed). But I think here lies the problem with your position: in the short term, workers (who would continue to be workers, for starters) would need to continue to produce suits and automobiles, but that is because we don't have that "scientific plan" yet, and workers will need to run the factories in which they work; in the long term, production will be run by society at large, not by workers in each work place, and this through that "scientific plan"; but then the whole productive system will have been revamped and reshaped, and it is quite possible that suits or automobiles will no longer be produced.

The solution is that while we cannot meaningfully discuss whether bread, or suits, bicycles, handcuffs, automobiles, dreadnoughts, or (a divisive issue in OI) Monopoly board games will be produced in communism, we can and should discuss what is that "scientific plan", who conceives of it, how does it change over time, and how it relates to "demand".

And that "scientific plan" cannot be "scientific" in the vulgar, bourgeois, positivist, sence of the word "scientific". We cannot sit aside society, contemplate it, and let it fill ourselves with the pure, absolute, neutral, "scientific" knowledge of what "demands" are, and how to fulfill them. Because the plan itself changes reality, and needs to adapt to every change.

Capitalist societies deal with the issue of innovation through markets. If a fashion designer decides that people should wear togas instead of suits, s/he will produce prototypes, schedule an "event", and make an spectacle of his/her togas. If s/he manages to convince people that togas are the new hot thing, then presto: here we are using togas, or perhaps just envying people who can actually wear togas instead of dull suits and boring overalls. Is s/he fails, well, then at least the "event" was a commodity in itself.

Which is just a contorted way of saying, in capitalist societies, "demand" is also "produced".

We will have to find ways to deal with this kind of "innovation" through a "scientific plan" - and this means dealing with it in a way that isn't "in communism people won't care about fashion anymore, so everybody will wear suits and not give a second thought about it" (which very much, in the end, resembles the already condemned line of "let's forbid conspicuous consumption").

If "demands" can be produced, or fabricated, who decides about it? How do we make this into the "scientific plan"?

It is of course possible that some people think socialism will happen after a few cjenturies, probably either after the invention of the mystical nanotechnology that will make human labour obsolete, or after centuries of "socialist" (social-democratic) bourgeois governments, but that is not only a gross distortion of Marxism, it makes talking about such socialism entirely pointless.

Agree. Whatever the time the transition takes, if after 72 years you are still transitioning, then you are not transitioning at all.

I don't think it is possible for brands to exist in socialism at all, the Armani brand not excluded. Even if - and that's a big if - we ignore the abolition of money and the market, which provide the context in which brands operate - standardisation is an important part of socialist production.

I am not sure that brands won't exist in communist, though of course if they do, they will necessarily have different functions. I would still like to know who are the people manufacturing the things I am getting for free; just because they are for free it doesn't mean that I don't prefer the real Camembert over whatever stinking piece of rotten milk they might call "Camembert" in Minas Gerais.

And I am not that sure about "standardisation". Diversity is important, and a value of itself. I would like to easily find the right nut for each screw (hm, that sounded unduly kinky), and standardisation is good for that end; but while I myself do not much mind wearing like everybody else, I realise that people like to dress in individualised ways (and that human bodies aren't mass produced like screws, so the rightly fitting dress might need customisation instead of standartisation).

Socialism means the abolition of the family, not just the "nuclear" variant but the entire institution. That said, even if the car was "intended" for nuclear families (I don't think it's particularly important to dissect the origin of the car here), they have found use outside that situation. They would still be use-values after the abolition of the family, for situations in which it is necessary to cross distances we can expect in or between the socialist cities, without having to wait for public transport.

I don't know exactly how people will organise for reproduction in a communist society, other than it quite certainly won't be in nuclear families. But nuclear families are the only ones relevant here; all other forms of family are already gone, and automobiles certainly weren't designed for the Roman expanded patriarchal family.

So how do we travel from one city to another, or within a city, without "waiting" for public transport? What kind of transportation would be available, besides cheap, frequent, safe public transportation? If you mean that each individual has a car in his/her garage, then it is a gross "waste of labour hours"; why would we have a permanent car for eventual transport? And if so, why would that car have four or five seats, suspiciously reminiscent of nuclear families? If, on the contrary, cars are freely available for the use of anyone, then how exactly are they not part of "public" transportation?

And I think the point is wrong. Demand it what it is. Much of it comes from individual decisions, or as you derisively say whims. Whether we agree with it or understand it is besides the point. I don't understand why others demand football broadcasts, and other disapprove of the demand for e.g. gay pornography. But demand is demand. It can either be suppressed, which requires some sort of state apparatus at the very least, or it can be taken as it is. The socialist approach is the latter one - demand being such and such, the chief task of the socialist society is the technical task of matching production and distribution to demand. This includes the infrastructural component. To introduce too much discussion in the carrying out of this technical task is, I think, a democratoid error.

But, as we have already seen, "demand" can be, and actually is, "manufactured" even in capitalist societies. Demand is a social construct. And so, our "scientific plan" must deal with the issue of what demands we want to foster, and which we don't. There is a demand for bread, and there is a demand for child pornography. There is a demand for arsenic, and a demand for crack cocaine.

Supply for those demands requires work, planning, organising, factor of production (which in turn require all those things). And fulfilling those demands does have social consequences; if we are going to supply all the crack cocaine that is on demand, sooner or later we will not be able to produce it at all, with all of us going batshit insane on crack cocaine and consequently unable to produce crack cocaine. We will have to have negative feedback, lest we allow our so hard-fought-for communist society to crumble under the pressure of unbalanced demands.

That is obviously not the case. If a neolithic producer had tried to make a stone tool from scratch rather than using imported cores, they would have been wasting their labour-time. Money, and more generally value, can only be wasted in capitalist society, that is true, as value does not exist under socialism. But labour-time, divorced from value, is simply another quantity associated with production. And at the end of the day, there are only so many hours that someone is alive. If that time is spent building, maintaining and working at grossly inefficient (in material terms) local projects, less time is available for cultural and scientific life - precisely what is necessary to break from local cretinism.

I think this is reading capitalism into neolithic primitive socialism. There is no "labour-time" divorced from "value", because "labour" is not "work"; work is merely human activity that transforms reality; labour is such activity subjected to the production of value.

What differs a communist society from a capitalist society is that "labour" is superceeded. We don't want to reduce work to a minimal; we want to work to minimise the need of human repetitive, nonsencical activity. Whether it takes us two minutes or ten years to devise the instrument that allows us to no longer have to wash the dishes, it makes no difference. As well, it makes no actual difference whether we have a global dish-washer that somehow washes the dishes for everybody, be them from Uzbekistan or Darkest Peru, or billions of individual dish-washers that wash the dishes in each individual home. The point is that people will no longer have to wash dishes instead of listening to music, discovering the cure for AIDS, or wondering about parallel universes.

And time used to read poetry, cook creative dishes, or idly discuss future society is time earned, not time wasted. We must liberate ourselves from the tyranny of productivity.

Luís Henrique

LuÃs Henrique

18th October 2015, 16:51

Yeah, but that's *you* -- you're attempting to generalize *all individual behavior* according to your *own* predilections.

What if someone happened to be almost 100% like you, except that they *wanted* to possess a Spitfire -- ?

How many people do you know who want a Spitfire?

Luís Henrique

Hit The North

18th October 2015, 17:08

How many people do you know who want a Spitfire?

Luís Henrique

Can I raise my hand at this point?

Seriously, Luis is right, though. Whatever status order survives in socialism it will not depend on the conspicuous displays of consumption we see under capitalism.

Less seriously, has anyone here read Michael Moorcock's Dancers At The Edge of Time trilogy? It is a future society of extreme abundance where technology allows such a mastery over nature that it basically becomes like magic. I like to think this is the direction communism will take future technology.

...

ckaihatsu

18th October 2015, 17:10

---

How many people do you know who want a Spitfire?

(But perhaps people in a communist society will like impractical dresses, who knows. And this would be the point, who knows.)

LuÃs Henrique

18th October 2015, 17:13

More and more people are making pressure for more efficient means of transport... Metro, Bus, Bicycle, Train, the growth of these is a global trend, and it is starting (But right now just starting) even in my Car-driven economy (And social Status) of Brazil

I think in socialism, where there is no bureaucracy neither a bourgeoisie making money on Always-Broken Metros, Awful "Bus Oligarchies", and neither the people that scream "BICYCLES IS COMMUNIST BOLIVARIANISM!!" (Yes, believe me, this exist), more and more this means of transport will substitute Cars.

Well, lore has it that Che Guevara once said, "revolution is like a bicycle, if it doesn't move forward it falls", so perhaps they are not totally off the mark.

But seriously, yes, it seems in São Paulo bikers are the new Jew (http://spressosp.com.br/2015/09/28/o-odio-em-estado-bruto-contra-as-ciclovias-de-haddad/).

Luís Henrique

Ele'ill

19th October 2015, 14:48

Comrade Jacob

19th October 2015, 18:42

Capitalism gives us useless shit, socialism gives us useful shit.

The Garbage Disposal Unit

19th October 2015, 18:54

Why would you ever want that? For one thing, anything "small-scale" is going to be much less efficient, in material terms, than large-scale organisation, so labour hours are being wasted to support someone's fetish for localism, and second, it is a political decision. But why would we want to support the "local community" politically?

Sorry for taking a while to get to this.

See, the thing is, you use efficiency here in the same way as bourgeois economists, as though it doesn't concern political choices.
Is it "more efficient" to grow coffee in massive monocrops in Colombia than it is to grow coffee in Nova Scotia? Certainly! But that misses a whole lot of fundamental questions about fossil fuel inputs in agriculture (fertilizer, pesticides, etc.), transportation costs (both for production, in terms of chemical inputs machinery, etc., and for the final product), the longterm health of soil and ecosystems, etc. Finally, we need to consider the neo-colonial relations that are at the root of current coffee production, and ask whether or not workers, having seized the means of production, would have any reason to continue mass producing a luxury product to the detriment of their communities.
None of that to say that a globalized economy is impossible in a post-capitalist context - only that it's foolish to imagine one based on wildly destructive mass production that typifies capitalism.
To call that a "fetish for localism" is a cheap slur, reflecting the bizarre utopian "flying cars" thinking of early twentieth century utopians.
In The German Ideology, Marx notes, "[I]n communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic." Certainly, such forms of life are fundamentally incompatible with the "factory discipline" of mass production. To imagine communism as "capitalism socialized" is to miss the ethical core of Marxism.

Lord Testicles

19th October 2015, 18:56

Capitalism gives us useless shit, socialism gives us useful shit.

This is basically spam, stop it.

Spam/One-Line Posts

Please do not post any one-line posts like "I agree", "Good point", "Hear, Hear", or whatever to increase your post count. If you have nothing productive to say, don't say it! Notorious spammers/one-line posters will be banned.

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ckaihatsu

19th October 2015, 23:35

our ability to aquire knowledge needed to modify things ourselves wouldn't be as restricted (or restricted at all) so if the status now is to buy a cookie cut 'nice' thing perhaps the new status, which we do see now, would be our actual interaction with things that we come across such as various vehicles to computer IT stuff. And this would def. apply at a concentrated level within the industries themselves

Yes, I made this point earlier, f.y.i....

[I]n a more-open, better-socialized society, computation would become as available and accessible -- for more-imaginative directions -- as we expect everything else to become, like industrial productivity and the public domain in general.

ckaihatsu

19th October 2015, 23:41

Sorry for taking a while to get to this.

See, the thing is, you use efficiency here in the same way as bourgeois economists, as though it doesn't concern political choices.
Is it "more efficient" to grow coffee in massive monocrops in Colombia than it is to grow coffee in Nova Scotia? Certainly! But that misses a whole lot of fundamental questions about fossil fuel inputs in agriculture (fertilizer, pesticides, etc.), transportation costs (both for production, in terms of chemical inputs machinery, etc., and for the final product), the longterm health of soil and ecosystems, etc. Finally, we need to consider the neo-colonial relations that are at the root of current coffee production, and ask whether or not workers, having seized the means of production, would have any reason to continue mass producing a luxury product to the detriment of their communities.
None of that to say that a globalized economy is impossible in a post-capitalist context - only that it's foolish to imagine one based on wildly destructive mass production that typifies capitalism.
To call that a "fetish for localism" is a cheap slur, reflecting the bizarre utopian "flying cars" thinking of early twentieth century utopians.
In The German Ideology, Marx notes, "[I]n communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic." Certainly, such forms of life are fundamentally incompatible with the "factory discipline" of mass production. To imagine communism as "capitalism socialized" is to miss the ethical core of Marxism.

I concur, and I said as much to XXB in another thread....

Aside from the sourcing of actual *mineral deposits*, I don't see why any given type of production has to be so *geographically fixed*, as you're indicating. Couldn't aluminum smelting potentially be done *anywhere*, if proper facilities are constructed for it -- ?

'Globalization' is an *optimum*, but not a *necessity* -- given a post-capitalist social order people may actually *eschew* much of the long-distance transportation that is integral to today's market-based production. More-local production -- especially for the basics of life and living -- may be *favored* by a post-capitalist ethos, at least initially.

Why I gave up on traditional communism

http://www.revleft.com/vb/why-gave-up-t193405/index.html

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

20th October 2015, 11:26

While I have little doubt that it is indeed a "quality car", I don't think workers can buy it.

After a very cursory glance at the prices of Lamborghini automobiles and the wages of certain "high-risk" professions, I'm not that sure. It seems to me that someone who works in e.g. underwater welding could save enough money throughout their lifetime to buy a Lamborghini in retirement. I should point out, however, that I lack any practical knowledge concerning the buying and maintenance of automobiles.

Speculation on what things will be produced in a communist society is almost always idle. We are men and women who have been raised and educated under capitalism, which means under the "general light" of bourgeois ideology. And we will probably be unable to cast votes on what is going to be produced in a communist society, unless perchance the odd habit of allowing the dead to vote somehow makes its way into communism.

Ah, well, if that's your position, I think we have something of a problem.

I hold that socialism is possible now. Obviously no one knows when the socialist revolution will take place, or even if it will take place. It is more than possible that the course of human history leads to barbarism instead of the socialist society (this makes a socialist revolution in the near future all the more important). But socialism is possible in the present, and has been since the 19th century. To take the position that socialism is something that will happen in the far future means to turn socialism into a fiction, a myth. It means that all practical relevance of socialist politics is lost. Who wants to wrack their nerves fighting for a society that will only come (perhaps) long after they're dead and gone? This is why Pablo's fantastic line about "centuries of deformed workers' states" led to the end of open Pabloism as a significant tendency in the socialist movement. Who wants to live under the weight of a parasitic bureaucracy all their life?

On RevLeft, of course, this line is extremely popular, for the same reason "folk" Catholicism (Catholicism that allows the practitioner to have all the premarital sex he wants and still beat up gay people) is popular; it allows people to call themselves "socialists" so they can feel smug, "radical", good and hard, but to avoid drawing any practical conclusions from their avowed socialist principles, so they can continue to support Sanders, Corbyn, Tsipras, Woland etc. in peace.

That's more or less appliable to most commodities use-values, though I still think there is a gradation that goes from things that are quite probably continue to be produced in communism, at least in its first stages, like bread, for instance, to things like dreadnoughts, the necessity of which seems more doubtful. Handcuffs can be used for kinky sexual fantasies, at least, which I don't necessarily think is the case of dreadnoughts (but even then, I don't know what part of handcuff fantasies are linked to their merely material role as a restraining device (which could be easily replaced by ropes, for instance) and what part are directly linked with the social role of the police; if the latter is what really turns people on, then the use of handcuffs as sexual toys may be harmed by the abolition of police).

As I understand it, no vessel called a "dreadnought" by a significant number of the relevant people has been made after the London Naval Treaty. It's a bit odd that this term is remembered, whereas terms like "ironclad" or "windjammer" are generally not. In any case, the bourgeois state still has its cruisers and destroyers and so on - all kinds of vessels whose purpose is to make a large number of people dead. Obviously in socialism, barring some truly extraordinary circumstances, the demand for these things will be nil.

But I don't think we can equate cruisers and corn flakes, as kinds of commodities. Generally, it seems to me, demand comes from three kinds of sources, and correspondingly objects become use-values in three ways. There are objects that are useful to individual humans, objects that are useful to corporate groups, and finally objects that are useful to society in general, to which in capitalism we have to add the objects that are useful to the parasitic state.

Of the three categories, it is public goods that I expect to change the most in socialism. The socialist society has no need for destroyers, tanks, prisons, police batons, gallows, and so on. Corporate goods will change inasmuch certain groups, like the Church, will cease to exist (so the need for crucifixes and monstrances and censers etc. will cease to exist as well), but I don't expect much change in the things universities and laboratories, for example, need, not in the short term. Individual goods will change the least, as consumption patterns change slowly relative to the time scale in which the revolution and the revolutionary transition happens in the near future.

Finally, concerning handcuffs, human perversity (which is a good thing, of course) does not really respect historical boundaries - it does not respect history, period. People can and do fetishise things that are not used anymore, and I don't see a reason to assume that will change in socialism.

What abolishes luxury is precisely free access, no doubt. But some use-values negate the idea of free access by themselves, and I am going to say that automobiles are among those. If there is free access to automobiles, in the way we are acquainted to think of automobiles and access to them, then the planet becomes an uninhabitable place, plagued by machinery moving at 8 km/h (that's 5 mph, for the decimal impaired) and "wasting labour hours". Which is more or less what we are starting to get under capitalism as of now. And so, it is possible that the whole function of automobiles needs to be revamped; they are not a solution for mass urban transportation, much on the contrary; if they are useful, they will have to be useful in a different way (and the relation between people and automobiles will need to change; the idea of "my" automobile is untenable, even if we understand the difference between personal property and private property; if there are going to be automobiles in a communist society, they will have to be at the disposal of the public, not of individual drivers).

I don't think that's convincing, to be honest. It relies on the unstated idea that free access is equal to everyone having the maximum possible use of the good in question. But then, any sort of free access becomes problematic. Free access to bread, if we accept these assumptions, would mean that everyone would eat lots of bread all the time and eventually coronary disease would get us all. It's just not plausible.

And obviously, it would be very strange for the socialist society to abolish capitalism but not the juridical notion of possession distinct from use. But even if an automobile is available to all who would use it, it is not public in the sense in which buses, trams etc. are. For one thing, the car will never be parked in the same place at the same time, unlike the bus which comes to the stop at the designated time, give or take a few minutes (assuming competent drivers).

And of course, the usefulness of automobiles is predicated on the weird idea that we don't work where we dwell, and don't dwell where we work, and that those two places are of necessity placed at an unwalkable distance from one another. Which seems one of those things that it is unlikely to be kept from capitalism into a communist society.

I don't think the idea is weird at all. Even in socialism - no, particularly in socialism. If I work in the chemical plant in the morning, fix computers in the afternoon and inspect factories in the evening, am I going to live in three or more places? Not to mention, even if it could be arranged that I live near all three, people in socialism will presumably change the tasks they preform a lot. Can they change the place where they sleep at the same rate? To me it seems that changing that too fast can be tiring. Not to mention that production and sleep are not the only things in life. In socialism, in particular, we will go to the theatre, go to the park, visit the ruins of capitalism and so on. Public transportation can manage most of these, of course. But sometimes you'll be running late or not be in a mood to deal with people on the trams (Links knows what I'm talking about). Then individual automobiles can pick up the slack.

Plus some people just like to drive. I would be one of them if the drivers in this city weren't all psychotic maniacs.

They will be run by society at large, no doubt, though I also realise that in a transitional period they will be likely be run "by their workers", while workers in them and other working places organise to assemble "scientific plans" to harmonise the outputs of different use-values in coherent ways (in the case of Lamborghini I fear this will necessitate a complete revamping of the factory, in order to produce very different cars, or different use-values, or even a complete abandonment of the factory). In any case the scientific plan cannot be directed by consumption whims; it must be guided by a "holistic" (I know, the word gives me the creeps too, but...) comprehension of the necessities of social reproduction.

But that doesn't tell me anything, to be honest. Perhaps it's just that I haven't had my morning shot of whiskey yet, perhaps you've been afflicted with Rafiqism. In any case, what you term "consumption whims", aggregated over some definite period, provide most of the input side of the planning process. What remains is to allocate targets and draw up schedules, guided by a scientific model of production.

I think workers running "their own" factories is a recipe for disaster, for particularism of the worst sort. It failed miserably with VIKZheDor, and it would fail miserably in any revolutionary situation, where the interests of any particular group of workers can sharply differ from the interest of the working class in general.

The solution is that while we cannot meaningfully discuss whether bread, or suits, bicycles, handcuffs, automobiles, dreadnoughts, or (a divisive issue in OI) Monopoly board games will be produced in communism, we can and should discuss what is that "scientific plan", who conceives of it, how does it change over time, and how it relates to "demand".

And that "scientific plan" cannot be "scientific" in the vulgar, bourgeois, positivist, sence of the word "scientific". We cannot sit aside society, contemplate it, and let it fill ourselves with the pure, absolute, neutral, "scientific" knowledge of what "demands" are, and how to fulfill them. Because the plan itself changes reality, and needs to adapt to every change.

Obviously the plan changes reality. If it doesn't, it's not a plan but some kind of weird technical semi-poetry. But the question is, in what way does it change reality? It tells the productive units how much goods to produce so that supply matches demand. Here it is imperative to take demand for what it is. Otherwise we give so much leeway to the planners their job becomes trivial. If they can't fulfill the demand for rubber, they can just write it off. Not to mention the actual harm done by people who imagine they can dictate consumption patterns to other people.

Capitalist societies deal with the issue of innovation through markets. If a fashion designer decides that people should wear togas instead of suits, s/he will produce prototypes, schedule an "event", and make an spectacle of his/her togas. If s/he manages to convince people that togas are the new hot thing, then presto: here we are using togas, or perhaps just envying people who can actually wear togas instead of dull suits and boring overalls. Is s/he fails, well, then at least the "event" was a commodity in itself.

Which is just a contorted way of saying, in capitalist societies, "demand" is also "produced".

That's the thing; it's not. Demand arises as the response of individuals and definite groups to their conditions. Changing the conditions might lead to a change in demand, perhaps. But what you describe, and what is sometimes described (wrongly, I think) as manufacturing demand, is mediated by social structures - status, celebrity culture etc. - that will not exist in socialism. And it doesn't always work. In fact most people wouldn't dream of wearing the clothes that are on display at fashion shows.

We will have to find ways to deal with this kind of "innovation" through a "scientific plan" - and this means dealing with it in a way that isn't "in communism people won't care about fashion anymore, so everybody will wear suits and not give a second thought about it" (which very much, in the end, resembles the already condemned line of "let's forbid conspicuous consumption").

I don't see how that will even be possible. Not only is actual innovation impossible to plan for by definition, how would you reproduce the effects of things like status without reproducing these things as well, which is surely contrary to the radical social leveling that socialism implies?

I am not sure that brands won't exist in communist, though of course if they do, they will necessarily have different functions. I would still like to know who are the people manufacturing the things I am getting for free; just because they are for free it doesn't mean that I don't prefer the real Camembert over whatever stinking piece of rotten milk they might call "Camembert" in Minas Gerais.

But there is nothing about the location in which "real" Camembert is produced or the people who produce it that magically endows is with greater quality than the imitation produced in Minas Gerais. Standardisation would take care of this, obviously; cheap knock-off products would disappear as there would be no need for them.

And I am not that sure about "standardisation". Diversity is important, and a value of itself. I would like to easily find the right nut for each screw (hm, that sounded unduly kinky), and standardisation is good for that end; but while I myself do not much mind wearing like everybody else, I realise that people like to dress in individualised ways (and that human bodies aren't mass produced like screws, so the rightly fitting dress might need customisation instead of standartisation).

I don't think diversity is a value in itself, but in any case it's not at odds with standardisation. Standardisation doesn't mean there is only one size of a suit. It means that an XL suit bought in Italy won't leave you feeling like a walrus because you can't fit. It means when you buy Camembert it will be made to the same sort of specifications, whether it's made in France or in China. And so on. This is important because, for planning purposes, we need a definite list of the goods circulating around the world.

But, as we have already seen, "demand" can be, and actually is, "manufactured" even in capitalist societies. Demand is a social construct. And so, our "scientific plan" must deal with the issue of what demands we want to foster, and which we don't. There is a demand for bread, and there is a demand for child pornography. There is a demand for arsenic, and a demand for crack cocaine.

Supply for those demands requires work, planning, organising, factor of production (which in turn require all those things). And fulfilling those demands does have social consequences; if we are going to supply all the crack cocaine that is on demand, sooner or later we will not be able to produce it at all, with all of us going batshit insane on crack cocaine and consequently unable to produce crack cocaine. We will have to have negative feedback, lest we allow our so hard-fought-for communist society to crumble under the pressure of unbalanced demands.

And how is this not "government over men"? You expect society to be organised according to the dictates of your personal ethics. Well, why would anyone besides you care about that? Socialism, if anything, is amoral, the public power is purely administrative and technical. If people want cocaine then they want cocaine. Saying that we'll all be insane on cocaine is the same sort of fallacy as saying we'll all die in a great traffic jam; just because cocaine is produced and consumed doesn't mean we're all getting fucked up on it every minute of every day. In fact, if you want people to do that, simply ban drug use or "discourage" it or however you want to put it.

I think this is reading capitalism into neolithic primitive socialism. There is no "labour-time" divorced from "value", because "labour" is not "work"; work is merely human activity that transforms reality; labour is such activity subjected to the production of value.

It was my impression that the terms were usually used the other way around; labour being the category that transcends class society (as in Lukacs's "ontology of labour") and work being compelled labour under class society. In any case, whether we call it work or labour or Geoff, the time spent doing it has been a limiting factor in human production for quite some time. In capitalism that time becomes value, but that doesn't mean that in feudalism or the Asiatic mode of production labour-time was irrelevant simply because it did not have the value form. Obviously some feudal or Asiatic estates were more productive than others and allowed their owners to gain an advantage over others, usually a military advantage.

What differs a communist society from a capitalist society is that "labour" is superceeded. We don't want to reduce work to a minimal; we want to work to minimise the need of human repetitive, nonsencical activity. Whether it takes us two minutes or ten years to devise the instrument that allows us to no longer have to wash the dishes, it makes no difference. As well, it makes no actual difference whether we have a global dish-washer that somehow washes the dishes for everybody, be them from Uzbekistan or Darkest Peru, or billions of individual dish-washers that wash the dishes in each individual home. The point is that people will no longer have to wash dishes instead of listening to music, discovering the cure for AIDS, or wondering about parallel universes.

And time used to read poetry, cook creative dishes, or idly discuss future society is time earned, not time wasted. We must liberate ourselves from the tyranny of productivity.

Well, yes, but as magic does not exist, to liberate ourselves from the tyranny of productivity requires a substantial amount of productivity, particularly of dead labour. I never said the time to read poetry, etc., was wasted. Quite the contrary. I said the time spent working in a small power generator when we could have a larger power generator and have less people working less to produce the same amount of electricity is wasted time. And that time eats into the time we have available for reading poetry, etc.

See, the thing is, you use efficiency here in the same way as bourgeois economists, as though it doesn't concern political choices.
Is it "more efficient" to grow coffee in massive monocrops in Colombia than it is to grow coffee in Nova Scotia? Certainly! But that misses a whole lot of fundamental questions about fossil fuel inputs in agriculture (fertilizer, pesticides, etc.), transportation costs (both for production, in terms of chemical inputs machinery, etc., and for the final product), the longterm health of soil and ecosystems, etc. Finally, we need to consider the neo-colonial relations that are at the root of current coffee production, and ask whether or not workers, having seized the means of production, would have any reason to continue mass producing a luxury product to the detriment of their communities.

Well, no, I'm not. For bourgeois economists, efficiency is monetary efficiency. For socialists, efficiency can only mean material efficiency (or rather efficiencies, as different production processes use different inputs with varying degrees of efficiency).

Things like inputs of various goods and transportation costs are a key question of planned production. Obviously we want to calculate them at some point, because we need to plan the entire global process of production and circulation of goods. But then, large-scale production requires less inputs; it's more materially efficient to have one large-scale coffee plantation with its associated machinery than to have thousands of small plots, each one either with their own agricultural machinery or with thousands of near-peasants condemned to a cretinous existence.

Not to mention how baseless it is to talk of "communities" when the mobility of individuals will be much higher in socialism than it is now - and even now, it makes no sense to talk about communities, really. It's not as if we live in the feudal society and are bound to one specific location.

To call that a "fetish for localism" is a cheap slur, reflecting the bizarre utopian "flying cars" thinking of early twentieth century utopians.

Ha, I would bet you can't actually cite any utopians who talked about flying cars, unless you're referring to our Ford. But it is a fetish. We could be using economies of scale to have an effective industrial production that requires each of us to preform only little labour and have the rest of the day free for whatever we want to, an integrated world where backward local, ethnic etc. differences have been erased, and you're talking about local hobby projects. I would say the reactionary Lasch was right; this sort of localist socialism has more to do with conservatism than Marxist progressivism.

In The German Ideology, Marx notes, "[I]n communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic." Certainly, such forms of life are fundamentally incompatible with the "factory discipline" of mass production. To imagine communism as "capitalism socialized" is to miss the ethical core of Marxism.

I don't think Marxism has an "ethical core". If it did, of course, the question would arise why we should care about that "core", or any sort of ethics people pull out of their arses. What Marx describes has nothing to do with ethics but is a consequence of the way in which labour will be organised in the future. But how is that compatible with localism at all? If society is fragmented into small locales, I can't be whatever I please, I can only be something from a limited subset of options that are available in "my community".

Nor does this negate factory discipline, as Marx and Engels themselves noted. Everyone is free to go into a factory or not, as they please, but once they do it's "Lasciate ogni autonomia, voi che entrate." Because every combined mode of production needs coordination, needs the managerial function.

LuÃs Henrique

20th October 2015, 13:17

To take the position that socialism is something that will happen in the far future

There is more time between 1788 and 1795 than between 1600 and 1788.

Luís Henrique

Ele'ill

20th October 2015, 14:18

Yes, I made this point earlier, f.y.i....

okay

LuÃs Henrique

20th October 2015, 17:59

Ah, well, if that's your position, I think we have something of a problem.

I hold that socialism is possible now. Obviously no one knows when the socialist revolution will take place, or even if it will take place. It is more than possible that the course of human history leads to barbarism instead of the socialist society (this makes a socialist revolution in the near future all the more important). But socialism is possible in the present, and has been since the 19th century. To take the position that socialism is something that will happen in the far future means to turn socialism into a fiction, a myth. It means that all practical relevance of socialist politics is lost. Who wants to wrack their nerves fighting for a society that will only come (perhaps) long after they're dead and gone? This is why Pablo's fantastic line about "centuries of deformed workers' states" led to the end of open Pabloism as a significant tendency in the socialist movement. Who wants to live under the weight of a parasitic bureaucracy all their life?

I think there is a different problem with Pabloism. It is not merely that "centuries of deformed worker States" is too much time to wait for the real thing; it is that, as history has proven, "deformed worker States" are not an actual transitional stage between capitalism and communism; where they have existed, they transitioned to capitalism, not to communism.

So, perhaps we could wait 72 years, if we were seeing actual transition, ie, if the workings of a capitalist society were in fact being superceeded by the workings of a communist society. But anyone who earnestly looked into the internal workings of "deformed workers States" would see nothing like this; instead, what was there to see was total disempowerment of the working class, coupled with continuity of the categories of market (value, prices, demand, supply, etc.) and not just the continuity, but actually an exacerbation of State repression.

On RevLeft, of course, this line is extremely popular, for the same reason "folk" Catholicism (Catholicism that allows the practitioner to have all the premarital sex he wants and still beat up gay people) is popular; it allows people to call themselves "socialists" so they can feel smug, "radical", good and hard, but to avoid drawing any practical conclusions from their avowed socialist principles, so they can continue to support Sanders, Corbyn, Tsipras, Woland etc. in peace.

There are many forms of pretending to be ueberradikal without actually being, and not all of them imply support for socialdemocrats or liberals in the American sence. They are not usually related to some version of Pabloism, though. They are related to a lack of connection to actual working class struggle (of which Pabloism is just a symptom, and indeed only one of many possible symptoms).

But I don't think we can equate cruisers and corn flakes, as kinds of commodities.

Indeed no, that being the point. Different use-values have different uses; some of these uses are dependent on the kind of society we live in, others are not, or at least are less.

Generally, it seems to me, demand comes from three kinds of sources, and correspondingly objects become use-values in three ways. There are objects that are useful to individual humans, objects that are useful to corporate groups, and finally objects that are useful to society in general, to which in capitalism we have to add the objects that are useful to the parasitic state.

There are objects (in the most ample acception of "object", including things that are not material at all) that are useful to individual humans, but such usefulness is intertwinned with social mores. A car is useful as a means of transportation; a Lamborghini is useful as a means of transportation, and probably more useful as a way to assert social status. And while transportation remains a necessity in whatever kind of society, capitalist, pre-capitalist, or post-capitalist, social status does not.

There are objects that are useful for "society in general", but then a communist society in general is very different from a capitalist society in general. There is a whole plethora of objects that are only useful because we live in a monetary economy.

Of the three categories, it is public goods that I expect to change the most in socialism. The socialist society has no need for destroyers, tanks, prisons, police batons, gallows, and so on. Corporate goods will change inasmuch certain groups, like the Church, will cease to exist (so the need for crucifixes and monstrances and censers etc. will cease to exist as well), but I don't expect much change in the things universities and laboratories, for example, need, not in the short term. Individual goods will change the least, as consumption patterns change slowly relative to the time scale in which the revolution and the revolutionary transition happens in the near future.

Indeed, use-values that are useful only for State repression have no place in a communist society. And universities and laboratories (as well as schools, museums, libraries, etc.) are possibly the least problematic; what they need changes according to their own proceedings. Which are quite transparent.

But I think you underestimate the potential change in individual consumption. Not only technological development changes what people need, but the way individuals relate to each other dictates much of individual consumption. Lot of use-values work as social markers; while they may be necessary for shelter, transportation, food, etc., they fulfill such roles at the same time and on the same movement they tell us whether the individual is a bourgeois, a petty-bourgeois, or a proletarian (among many other informations about themselves).

Finally, concerning handcuffs, human perversity (which is a good thing, of course) does not really respect historical boundaries - it does not respect history, period. People can and do fetishise things that are not used anymore, and I don't see a reason to assume that will change in socialism.

Human perversion may not respect history, but the forms in which it manifestates must do so. Whatever kinky things ancient Romans liked to do, they didn't dress as London Metropolitan Police when indulging in sado-masochistic fantasies.

I don't think that's convincing, to be honest. It relies on the unstated idea that free access is equal to everyone having the maximum possible use of the good in question. But then, any sort of free access becomes problematic. Free access to bread, if we accept these assumptions, would mean that everyone would eat lots of bread all the time and eventually coronary disease would get us all. It's just not plausible.

If we are to take in serious the assumption that use-values are different, then we will realise that bread is the kind of use-value that we have negative feedback against overconsumption. We get fed up with bred, quite literally. The same cannot be said of all use-values. Cocaine and cars, for instance, seem to have not such biologically in-built negative feedback.

Car drivers, at least in Brazilian huge cities, tend to demand more and more public infrastructure to increase the urban mobility of automobiles. This means destroying environment, dislodging people, in fewer words, wasting an enormous amount of resources (labour time included), in order to make the inferno even worse. This, I fear, cannot be addressed in an individual level; we will have to collectively decide what shape our cities should have, and the amount of viably available automobiles is a function of such decisions.

And obviously, it would be very strange for the socialist society to abolish capitalism but not the juridical notion of possession distinct from use. But even if an automobile is available to all who would use it, it is not public in the sense in which buses, trams etc. are. For one thing, the car will never be parked in the same place at the same time, unlike the bus which comes to the stop at the designated time, give or take a few minutes (assuming competent drivers).

In any way, we will have to wait for cars, or walk to the places where cars are parked, just we wait for buses or the metro, and walk to the places where they are available.

Or else we can have easy access to a car in our garage, and then wait in traffic jams because automobiles are so inefficient as means of mass transportation.

I don't think the idea is weird at all. Even in socialism - no, particularly in socialism. If I work in the chemical plant in the morning, fix computers in the afternoon and inspect factories in the evening, am I going to live in three or more places? Not to mention, even if it could be arranged that I live near all three, people in socialism will presumably change the tasks they preform a lot. Can they change the place where they sleep at the same rate? To me it seems that changing that too fast can be tiring. Not to mention that production and sleep are not the only things in life. In socialism, in particular, we will go to the theatre, go to the park, visit the ruins of capitalism and so on. Public transportation can manage most of these, of course. But sometimes you'll be running late or not be in a mood to deal with people on the trams (Links knows what I'm talking about). Then individual automobiles can pick up the slack.

I suppose a whole lot of the activities we use to call "work" can be conducted from "home" (whatever "home" may be in a communist society). Sure, menial work in factories can't, but the point would be to reduce such activities to a bare minimal, not to overwork ourselves in as many different menial activities as possible.

Plus some people just like to drive. I would be one of them if the drivers in this city weren't all psychotic maniacs.

Yeah, I do like to drive. So it is not that I am trying to impose my own predilections upon mankind.

Are all the drivers in your city psychotic maniacs when they are not driving, too? Or is such psychotic mania induced by cars, or traffic?

In any case, what you term "consumption whims", aggregated over some definite period, provide most of the input side of the planning process. What remains is to allocate targets and draw up schedules, guided by a scientific model of production.

I don't think so. Evidently in a city with no decent public transportation system, people will demand cars. And the more cars they get, the more the public transportation system degrades, and the more cars they demand. And the more cars they get, the more they demand wider avenues, at the expense of trees, houses, sidewalks, pedestrians. And the wider avenues they get, more cars are able to circulate, until wider and wider avenues are needed.

In a sane world, traffic jams would signal to people that there are too many cars, and so that the consumption of cars is overdimensioned and should be reduced. In reality, traffic jams seem to signal to people that there are too many bicycles, sidewalks, trees, pedestrians, reformist mayors - and we get "psychotic maniacs", as you call them, doing what the driver in the video posted above does, vociferating against anything that obstaculises his automobile.

I think workers running "their own" factories is a recipe for disaster, for particularism of the worst sort. It failed miserably with VIKZheDor, and it would fail miserably in any revolutionary situation, where the interests of any particular group of workers can sharply differ from the interest of the working class in general.

I think workers running "their own factories" is a recipe to the reinstating of capitalism. But what is the time frame we are working in? Are we thinking two years after revolution, or are we thinking the day after? If we agree that the day after workers should keep the production running, then its little possibility to do anything else than "run their own factories". If we agree that "running their own factories" is a recipe for reinstating capitalism, then we will have to introduce deep changes into the productive system, that cannot be dumbed down to a "scientific plan" that acts like a Walrasian auctioneer ex-machina.

And this is the problem of transition. We cannot revel in interminable "transitions" that never deliver a "transitioned" society, but we cannot skirt the transition. We will not go to sleep under capitalism and wake the following day under communism; there is a series of complex, interdependent steps that need be taken (and that will need to start to be taken before we have our magical scientific plan, and that will indeed be pre-condition to any workable plan.

Obviously the plan changes reality. If it doesn't, it's not a plan but some kind of weird technical semi-poetry. But the question is, in what way does it change reality? It tells the productive units how much goods to produce so that supply matches demand.

But then when it does that, it changes the demands. So our plan risks to always run after the bus, dictating that we produce for the demands of yesterday, only to discover that such demands are no longer in place, so we have oveproduced a few use-values and underproduced as many others.

Here it is imperative to take demand for what it is.

This is certainly what we are going to do they day after. But in the long term this is a recipe for disaster, or to the reinstatement of capitalism, for the demands we now have are demands of a society organised by capital.

Otherwise we give so much leeway to the planners their job becomes trivial. If they can't fulfill the demand for rubber, they can just write it off. Not to mention the actual harm done by people who imagine they can dictate consumption patterns to other people.

That's a one-sided view. True, people need rubber, so rubber needs production. But rubber demands either rubber trees or oil, and oil is a non-renewable resource, and rubber trees demand land, which is a non-renewable and actually limited resource. So we need a negative feed-back mechanism, lest we destroy the planet to have our rubber. In capitalism this negative feedback mechanism is price; if we get short on oil or land due to our demand for rubber, then the price of rubber rises, making the demand to fall. It is an awfully inefficient mechanism, but, at the price of famines and wars, it makes us stop overconsumption. What we need is a better mechanism of negative feedback, not a glorification of "demands" for the sake of demands.

That's the thing; it's not. Demand arises as the response of individuals and definite groups to their conditions. Changing the conditions might lead to a change in demand, perhaps. But what you describe, and what is sometimes described (wrongly, I think) as manufacturing demand, is mediated by social structures - status, celebrity culture etc. - that will not exist in socialism. And it doesn't always work. In fact most people wouldn't dream of wearing the clothes that are on display at fashion shows.

Those things will not exist in a communist society, but for such non-existance to obtain, they will have to be actively destroyed. And such destruction requires actual critical approach to the issue of demands.

I don't see how that will even be possible. Not only is actual innovation impossible to plan for by definition, how would you reproduce the effects of things like status without reproducing these things as well, which is surely contrary to the radical social leveling that socialism implies?

Well, either we "take demand for what it is", as it is "it is imperative to" do, or we don't. If we take demand for what it is, we start with a system of demands that does include people demanding social markers. You can of course have a "scientific plan" that somehow excludes such demands for social markers, but then you are not "taking demand for what it is", you are, in the end, telling people what they should demand. The Chinese for instance "abolished" the demand for individualised dressing, and told everybody that what they really needed was a practical uniform overall, equal for everyone. It is said that this in turn sparked the demand for pockets and pens, since while you couldn't dress a Giorgio Armani, you could express your hierarchy within the "deformed worker's State" by the number of pockets your uniform had, and by the number of pens you stuck into them.

I don't think diversity is a value in itself, but in any case it's not at odds with standardisation. Standardisation doesn't mean there is only one size of a suit. It means that an XL suit bought in Italy won't leave you feeling like a walrus because you can't fit. It means when you buy Camembert it will be made to the same sort of specifications, whether it's made in France or in China. And so on. This is important because, for planning purposes, we need a definite list of the goods circulating around the world.

If for planning purposes we need a definite list of the goods circulating around the world, then we are doomed, for such list can only exist at expense of any changes in production, that is, at the expense of any progress.

And how is this not "government over men"? You expect society to be organised according to the dictates of your personal ethics. Well, why would anyone besides you care about that? Socialism, if anything, is amoral, the public power is purely administrative and technical. If people want cocaine then they want cocaine. Saying that we'll all be insane on cocaine is the same sort of fallacy as saying we'll all die in a great traffic jam; just because cocaine is produced and consumed doesn't mean we're all getting fucked up on it every minute of every day. In fact, if you want people to do that, simply ban drug use or "discourage" it or however you want to put it.

This, I think, is deeply mistaken. A communist society is still a society; it is not a mere collection of individuals. We aren't vying for an Asimovian Aurora; we are vying for communism.

In a capitalist society, our relations to other human beings are masked by the relations between our products. One produces cocaine because one wants the money that can be exchanged for cocaine; what happens to others, directly - as in the drug addict that buys one's cocaine, and grows sicker and sicker out of it - or indirectly - as in the rising social costs of hospitalisation of people getting sicker and sicker on cocaine - is irrelevant; as long as the value of the cocaine is similar to the value of the money exchanged for it, it is a fair exchange; there is nothing wrong there. One produces automobiles because one wants the money that can be exchanged for automobiles. Whether this is helping make a better world for all of us, or, as it seems more and more evident by the day, making the world a worse place to live in, is irrelevant.

A communist society should mean the end of such alienation. One no more has to think of cars, or cocaine, in terms of value; one has no more to obtain money in order to participate in the socially built wealth. It stands to reason that now one has the possibility, and perhaps even the necessity, of thinking about one is doing. In a capitalist society, if someone wants something, we are under the obligation of providing that something. We are forced to work. In a communist society, not so; we can, and probably should, decide that we are not going to produce this or that use-value, because we will be able to think beyond the money it will beget, and realise the social consequences of what we are doing.

It was my impression that the terms were usually used the other way around; labour being the category that transcends class society (as in Lukacs's "ontology of labour") and work being compelled labour under class society.

That could of course be; in Portuguese we have one only word for those things, "trabalho", so we have to resort to longer phrases and explanations to make clear what we mean. It is in any case a huge source of confusion, both in Portuguese and in English, and a confusion that Marxists should not allow in their thinking.

In any case, whether we call it work or labour or Geoff, the time spent doing it has been a limiting factor in human production for quite some time. In capitalism that time becomes value, but that doesn't mean that in feudalism or the Asiatic mode of production labour-time was irrelevant simply because it did not have the value form. Obviously some feudal or Asiatic estates were more productive than others and allowed their owners to gain an advantage over others, usually a military advantage.

A neolithic farmer wouldn't think of things like that; to him there would be no distinction between labour and leisure. He did what he had to do, both because he needed the result of his activity in order to survive, and because it was a good thing to do. His time was not divided between a time to labour, and a time to do all other things that make a human a human. In capitalism, as Marx says, we feel human only when we are doing that that any animal does - eating, sleeping, fucking, idling. When we do such things that only human do - to transform the world - we conversely feel as animals. But this does not apply to neolithical farmers. Consequently, as in the long joke about the Mexican, or Polynesian, fisher, he sees no reason to save his time in order to be able to do everything he wishes - he already does everything he wishes (that his wishes are petty, that's a different, though very real, problem, which probably requires a capitalist stage to solve).

Well, yes, but as magic does not exist, to liberate ourselves from the tyranny of productivity requires a substantial amount of productivity, particularly of dead labour.

That goes without saying. Only a quite industrialised society can put productivity in its correct place in human life - something to enjoy, by liberating ourselves from menial labour, not something to obssess ourselves about, by enslaving us to the tyranny of machines. Likewise, there are no primitivists or animal rights people in feudal or slave societies. You have to take meat, plastics and computers for granted, before you find the time to theorise about the abolition of meat, computers and plastics. Likewise, as we discussed elsewhere, communism requires a certain level of productive force, and human work being a productive force, communism requires a minimal amount of population to be made possible - this being the reason why a communist society that allowed itself to reduce its population beyond such a minimum would be in deep trouble (that meaning that contraception is also a social issue, not merely a question of wanting children or not).

Now, if we allow ourselves to be driven by uncriticised "demands", which are in many cases destructive - and I mean destructive of productive forces - we would be undermining that substantial amount of productivity that allows us to free ourselves from the tyranny of productivity. It seems to me that overproduction of some use-values - cars and cocaine being actually good examples of those - does just that: to destroy productive forces.

I never said the time to read poetry, etc., was wasted. Quite the contrary. I said the time spent working in a small power generator when we could have a larger power generator and have less people working less to produce the same amount of electricity is wasted time. And that time eats into the time we have available for reading poetry, etc.

There is a contradiction, though, between your reasoning about the size of power generators, and your reasoning about "taking demand for what it is": because if there is a small demand for some use-value, then it would be as wasteful to build enormous plants to produce a few unities of such use-value as it would to attempt to mass-produce enormous amounts of widely demanded goods within petty manufactures. Suppose someone badly wants gebimbles (what is a gebimble? you see, the demand for it is so small that I can't even find it on google). Whay would we put up a farm, or a factory, to produce something for which there is so little demand? Either we wouldn't produce gebimbles - or we would try to increase the demand for gebimbles, so that it would be reasonable to build up a facility for making gebimbles. In one case, we aren't taking that rare demand for what it is; in the other case we would be manufacturing demand. Unless, of course, we admitted that some use-values are best produced in small productive units.

I don't think Marxism has an "ethical core".

I can agree with that; but then it has a rational core, to which the idea that "productivity" and "efficiency" cannot be extricated from capitalist production and circulation of commodities belongs.

Luís Henrique

ckaihatsu

21st October 2015, 04:53

okay

So what happens now?

= D

KillGreed444

21st October 2015, 05:17

Well unless we can crush the chains of Capitalism now, the Corporate Elite are going to use workplace automation to replace humanity, and what would ensue then is a nation-wide modern Luddite incident. Capitalists are trying to utilize technology for all of the wrong reasons, it is supposed to be for the benefit of humanity, not the replacement of humanity.

ckaihatsu

21st October 2015, 05:45

But then when it does that, it changes the demands. So our plan risks to always run after the bus, dictating that we produce for the demands of yesterday, only to discover that such demands are no longer in place, so we have oveproduced a few use-values and underproduced as many others.

What we need is a better mechanism of negative feedback, not a glorification of "demands" for the sake of demands.

This *is* a critical point for revolutionary theory -- the default seems to be to take *any* material request, no matter how small or trivial or demanding, as being socially 'valid', and to then press collective labor and production into action for the immediate fulfillment of such, no questions asked.

If there is no 'feedback loop', as a bare minimum, then, yes, a post-capitalist society *would* just be going by pre-existing, capitalist standards for all practices of production -- almost as absurd and surreal as capitalism itself.

Fortunately, I *have* put some attention to this question....

communist administration -- All assets and resources will be collectivized as communist property in common -- their use must be determined through a regular political process of prioritized demands from a locality or larger population -- any unused assets or resources may be used by individuals in a personal capacity only

consumption [demand] -- Every person in a locality has a standard, one-through-infinity ranking system of political demands available to them, updated daily

http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?b=1174

---

That's the thing; it's not. Demand arises as the response of individuals and definite groups to their conditions. Changing the conditions might lead to a change in demand, perhaps. But what you describe, and what is sometimes described (wrongly, I think) as manufacturing demand, is mediated by social structures - status, celebrity culture etc. - that will not exist in socialism. And it doesn't always work. In fact most people wouldn't dream of wearing the clothes that are on display at fashion shows.

Those things will not exist in a communist society, but for such non-existance to obtain, they will have to be actively destroyed. And such destruction requires actual critical approach to the issue of demands.

'Destruction' -- ? Really -- ?

On what basis -- ? A moralistic one -- ? Or would it be one of a commune-istic "material priorities", a throwback to a coarse forced participation from everyone in the name of an authoritarian 'egalitarianism' -- ?

Don't get me wrong -- I have no problem with a social collectivism that prioritizes critical human needs, and the (re-)building of social infrastructure, before the 'finer points' of fashion and aesthetics as cultural institutions. But 'destructiveness' smacks of *internal authoritarianism* and *moralism*, due to a lack of a *conscious* political program to actively *address* all such social phenomena, on a consistently egalitarian *policy* basis.

(Regarding 'demands', see above.)

LuÃs Henrique

24th October 2015, 14:25

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

25th October 2015, 01:47

In my original reply, I said that I wasn't sure why I was participating in this discussion in the first place, as obviously what Luis calls "socialism" is not what I would call socialism. Now, this remains the case. Nonetheless it is useful to register my disagreement, because, as utterly boring as my posts doubtlessly are, someone is probably reading this. And if, four or five years ago, I had read Louis's posts, and noted that no one seemed to object, I would think socialism is deeply problematic. Because that posts amounts to a kinder, gentler and also far less unhinged version of the same Jesuitical communionism (to use Draper's term) advocated by other members. And that's not socialism.

There is more time between 1788 and 1795 than between 1600 and 1788.

But if I thought I was perhaps being too harsh, this post dissuaded me. We all get the reference. But the reference is completely irrelevant; Lenin was talking about historic events. Now, the life span of humans is not measured in the number of historic events they are likely to experience. It is measured in boring old clock-time, physicists' time. The average member of this site, I imagine, has forty to fifty years before they become a corpse. To say that we will all die before the end of class society is to postpone socialism for some fifty years, at least. And despite the "clever" reference, it makes socialism some sort of idle dream. Good luck finding the worker who is willing to fight for something that might happen in the distant future.

I think there is a different problem with Pabloism. It is not merely that "centuries of deformed worker States" is too much time to wait for the real thing; it is that, as history has proven, "deformed worker States" are not an actual transitional stage between capitalism and communism; where they have existed, they transitioned to capitalism, not to communism.

Unfortunately for this narrative, Pablo lost control of the International Secretariat far before the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union. His brief period of political ascendancy was mainly in the fifties. By the sixties, when the Soviet Union seemed unlikely to go anywhere for, perhaps, centuries, his support had evaporated and Mandel and Frank took over the day-to-day operations of the IS, and by '65 they were able to erase Pablo and his remaining base of support, the minuscule African Bureau that looked to him more as a supporter of the FLN than a socialist theoretician.

There are many forms of pretending to be ueberradikal without actually being, and not all of them imply support for socialdemocrats or liberals in the American sence. They are not usually related to some version of Pabloism, though. They are related to a lack of connection to actual working class struggle (of which Pabloism is just a symptom, and indeed only one of many possible symptoms).

Indeed, Pabloism, the honest variant that no one follows anymore, or the Mandelite variant suitably alloyed with Maoist imagery and so on, like other forms of opportunism, arises from the class struggle; or rather, from the layer that always acts to spoil class struggle where it arises, the labour aristocracy and bureaucracy. What one sees on RevLeft more often than not is an imitation of opportunism.

Indeed, use-values that are useful only for State repression have no place in a communist society. And universities and laboratories (as well as schools, museums, libraries, etc.) are possibly the least problematic; what they need changes according to their own proceedings. Which are quite transparent.

But I think you underestimate the potential change in individual consumption. Not only technological development changes what people need, but the way individuals relate to each other dictates much of individual consumption. Lot of use-values work as social markers; while they may be necessary for shelter, transportation, food, etc., they fulfill such roles at the same time and on the same movement they tell us whether the individual is a bourgeois, a petty-bourgeois, or a proletarian (among many other informations about themselves).

Even so, use-values that function solely as markers of class distinction are rare. Gold foil, when used in food, is an example of such a use-value. But high-quality transportation, time-keeping, clothing and so on has utility quite independent of its use to mark its owner as belonging to a certain class. When the latter function withers away, the former remains. Likewise mirrors, which were used in Yayoi-period Japan to mark status (and were rarely used "properly"), continued to be used (in their mundane function) even after advances in bronze-working led to their symbolic function all but dying out.

Human perversion may not respect history, but the forms in which it manifestates must do so. Whatever kinky things ancient Romans liked to do, they didn't dress as London Metropolitan Police when indulging in sado-masochistic fantasies.

You don't say.

If we are to take in serious the assumption that use-values are different, then we will realise that bread is the kind of use-value that we have negative feedback against overconsumption. We get fed up with bred, quite literally. The same cannot be said of all use-values. Cocaine and cars, for instance, seem to have not such biologically in-built negative feedback.

Cocaine is associated with several negative feedback mechanisms, as are the vast majority of substances that influence the nervous system in some way. I would have thought this is common knowledge. That people still consume cocaine, or alcohol, or what have you, in amounts that jeopardise their health, is for the most part due to social conditions. Cars don't come with biological feedback mechanisms, but there are definite feedback mechanisms associated with traffic jams. That many people still decide to use cars despite this negative feedback is due, not to some insidious desire of men to overconsume, but due to the cutting of all public services, including public transport, and the pressures associated with wage labour.

I suppose a whole lot of the activities we use to call "work" can be conducted from "home" (whatever "home" may be in a communist society). Sure, menial work in factories can't, but the point would be to reduce such activities to a bare minimal, not to overwork ourselves in as many different menial activities as possible.

The point is to transform the way in which humans expend their labour-power. This includes both the abolition of every individual having a fixed sphere of activity, and the social abolition of menial work - which means, not that industrial robots will not have to be supervised by humans, but that the relation between this sort of work and intellectual etc. labour will fundamentally change. None of this can be done from the home, which is good unless you think it a good idea for people to be shut up in their households (ugh).

Yeah, I do like to drive. So it is not that I am trying to impose my own predilections upon mankind.

Are all the drivers in your city psychotic maniacs when they are not driving, too? Or is such psychotic mania induced by cars, or traffic?

Of course they are. They are psychotic maniacs in public transportation, in queues and so on. Some of it is due to cars as such; given a long enough traffic hold-up anyone would start to lose nerves. But more important than that (or the rurals coming into the city etc.) are the social conditions of modern capitalism. The only people who can live in this decaying capitalism and not go manic at least occasionally are all insane.

I don't think so. Evidently in a city with no decent public transportation system, people will demand cars. And the more cars they get, the more the public transportation system degrades, and the more cars they demand. And the more cars they get, the more they demand wider avenues, at the expense of trees, houses, sidewalks, pedestrians. And the wider avenues they get, more cars are able to circulate, until wider and wider avenues are needed.

In a sane world, traffic jams would signal to people that there are too many cars, and so that the consumption of cars is overdimensioned and should be reduced. In reality, traffic jams seem to signal to people that there are too many bicycles, sidewalks, trees, pedestrians, reformist mayors - and we get "psychotic maniacs", as you call them, doing what the driver in the video posted above does, vociferating against anything that obstaculises his automobile.

But who cares about reformist mayors? People on RevLeft have this touching devotion to social-democracy but one bourgeois politician is like all other bourgeois politicians. It is certainly no job of communists to defend them. The rest of this paragraph hinges on the idea that automobile transport must come at the expense of public transport and v.v. This is the case in capitalism where a city has a limited budget, but not in the socialist society, which plans production and infrastructure to fulfill need.

I think workers running "their own factories" is a recipe to the reinstating of capitalism. But what is the time frame we are working in? Are we thinking two years after revolution, or are we thinking the day after? If we agree that the day after workers should keep the production running, then its little possibility to do anything else than "run their own factories". If we agree that "running their own factories" is a recipe for reinstating capitalism, then we will have to introduce deep changes into the productive system, that cannot be dumbed down to a "scientific plan" that acts like a Walrasian auctioneer ex-machina.

And this is the problem of transition. We cannot revel in interminable "transitions" that never deliver a "transitioned" society, but we cannot skirt the transition. We will not go to sleep under capitalism and wake the following day under communism; there is a series of complex, interdependent steps that need be taken (and that will need to start to be taken before we have our magical scientific plan, and that will indeed be pre-condition to any workable plan.

Obviously there is more than a little possibility for doing something else than handing factories to "their" workers. To do so, in fact, would be colossally misguided - it would mean the dispersal of the means of production when what is necessary is their centralisation. After the revolution, the factories will be run by the existing corporate enterprises, obviously, and whatever organs for coordinating production already exist. In Russia these were the main committees and the centres, for example. The point is to subordinate these in turn to the workers' state and to begin the application of the methods of scientific planning, to the extent possible in an area still trading on the global market (via an external trade monopoly).

But then when it does that, it changes the demands. So our plan risks to always run after the bus, dictating that we produce for the demands of yesterday, only to discover that such demands are no longer in place, so we have oveproduced a few use-values and underproduced as many others.

How does it change demand? It raises demand for producer goods, true, but that is something that needs to be calculated for the entire planning period. Noting that the aggregate demand for rubber in e.g. six months' time (one planning cycle) is such-and-such doesn't simply mean that we set the targets for the rubber factories at such-and-such plus a certain amount of buffer stock; it means we calculate how much oil is necessary to produce the rubber, how much electricity etc. Hence socialist planning is scientific - it relies on a scientific understanding of the production processes, of complex systems etc.

Those things will not exist in a communist society, but for such non-existance to obtain, they will have to be actively destroyed. And such destruction requires actual critical approach to the issue of demands.

No, such "destruction" is precisely the way to preserve them. To "destroy" luxury is akin to abolishing the state by forming a death squad targeting "statists". Luxury is abolished when it loses its distinction from other goods.

Well, either we "take demand for what it is", as it is "it is imperative to" do, or we don't. If we take demand for what it is, we start with a system of demands that does include people demanding social markers.

Of course.

And since such social markers are available to anyone who wants them they lose their status as social markers, because they mark nothing. So after, perhaps, an initial slight spike in demand the demand stabilises or even rapidly deteriorates, depending on the good in question and if it is even a use-value outside class society.

If for planning purposes we need a definite list of the goods circulating around the world, then we are doomed, for such list can only exist at expense of any changes in production, that is, at the expense of any progress.

This is a bizarre contention. Forming the initial list of circulating goods entails simply collating existing lists made by individual enterprises. From there adding items to the list is simply a matter of paperwork. To think this would somehow stifle progress is bizarre. Or do you think firms in the capitalist society don't need things like permits, and other forms of paperwork?

This, I think, is deeply mistaken. A communist society is still a society; it is not a mere collection of individuals. We aren't vying for an Asimovian Aurora; we are vying for communism.

In a capitalist society, our relations to other human beings are masked by the relations between our products. One produces cocaine because one wants the money that can be exchanged for cocaine; what happens to others, directly - as in the drug addict that buys one's cocaine, and grows sicker and sicker out of it - or indirectly - as in the rising social costs of hospitalisation of people getting sicker and sicker on cocaine - is irrelevant; as long as the value of the cocaine is similar to the value of the money exchanged for it, it is a fair exchange; there is nothing wrong there. One produces automobiles because one wants the money that can be exchanged for automobiles. Whether this is helping make a better world for all of us, or, as it seems more and more evident by the day, making the world a worse place to live in, is irrelevant.

A communist society should mean the end of such alienation. One no more has to think of cars, or cocaine, in terms of value; one has no more to obtain money in order to participate in the socially built wealth. It stands to reason that now one has the possibility, and perhaps even the necessity, of thinking about one is doing. In a capitalist society, if someone wants something, we are under the obligation of providing that something. We are forced to work. In a communist society, not so; we can, and probably should, decide that we are not going to produce this or that use-value, because we will be able to think beyond the money it will beget, and realise the social consequences of what we are doing.

Socialist society means the end of alienation in the strict Marxist sense, the alienation of the producer from the product. It does not mean a return to pre-capitalist forms of social organisation. In fact in the socialist society man is freer from other men than he has ever been, since the start of class society. He is not forced into any unfree association with other people, and what large-scale (but also voluntary) associations exist are for the purpose of coordinating production. If someone disapproves of the things he does, things he consumes, how he has sex, whatever, this does not impact him in the slightest. His bonds are for him to choose.

A neolithic farmer wouldn't think of things like that; to him there would be no distinction between labour and leisure.

Obviously there was, not only on account of the purely biological fact that it is not the same to expend energy and conserve it, but also because we see quite ingenious labour-saving techniques in the neolithic society (stone adzes, arrows, bows, pottery etc.) but not one leisure-saving technique.

That goes without saying. Only a quite industrialised society can put productivity in its correct place in human life - something to enjoy, by liberating ourselves from menial labour, not something to obssess ourselves about, by enslaving us to the tyranny of machines. Likewise, there are no primitivists or animal rights people in feudal or slave societies. You have to take meat, plastics and computers for granted, before you find the time to theorise about the abolition of meat, computers and plastics. Likewise, as we discussed elsewhere, communism requires a certain level of productive force, and human work being a productive force, communism requires a minimal amount of population to be made possible - this being the reason why a communist society that allowed itself to reduce its population beyond such a minimum would be in deep trouble (that meaning that contraception is also a social issue, not merely a question of wanting children or not).

Now, if we allow ourselves to be driven by uncriticised "demands", which are in many cases destructive - and I mean destructive of productive forces - we would be undermining that substantial amount of productivity that allows us to free ourselves from the tyranny of productivity. It seems to me that overproduction of some use-values - cars and cocaine being actually good examples of those - does just that: to destroy productive forces.

The material productivity of socialist production is chiefly the productivity of dead labour. To think that cretinous labour-intensive methods will survive in socialism is completely mistaken. And yes, the reproduction of the socialist society is not guaranteed. In fact we can expect birth rates to sharply fall. But what of it? Socialism isn't magic; it places the decision in hands of human beings, not ossified social structures. If no one wants to continue the race, so be it. No one will be harmed by that.

And you, Luis, what are you going to do about it? Where are you going to find the workers who will let you prevent them from using contraception? And why stop at contraception? Why not outlaw homosexuality and abortion too? You sneer at anarcho-Stalinism, but you wish to reserve to yourself the prerogative to out-vozhd the vozhd when it comes to family-mongering.

There is a contradiction, though, between your reasoning about the size of power generators, and your reasoning about "taking demand for what it is": because if there is a small demand for some use-value, then it would be as wasteful to build enormous plants to produce a few unities of such use-value as it would to attempt to mass-produce enormous amounts of widely demanded goods within petty manufactures. Suppose someone badly wants gebimbles (what is a gebimble? you see, the demand for it is so small that I can't even find it on google). Whay would we put up a farm, or a factory, to produce something for which there is so little demand? Either we wouldn't produce gebimbles - or we would try to increase the demand for gebimbles, so that it would be reasonable to build up a facility for making gebimbles. In one case, we aren't taking that rare demand for what it is; in the other case we would be manufacturing demand. Unless, of course, we admitted that some use-values are best produced in small productive units.

If there is a demand, the socialist society organises to meet it. Even if the demand is not quantitatively high, it is more efficient to build a large-scale production unit so that the supply is able to scale.

LuÃs Henrique

27th October 2015, 18:46

In my original reply, I said that I wasn't sure why I was participating in this discussion in the first place, as obviously what Luis calls "socialism" is not what I would call socialism. Now, this remains the case. Nonetheless it is useful to register my disagreement, because, as utterly boring as my posts doubtlessly are, someone is probably reading this. And if, four or five years ago, I had read Louis's posts, and noted that no one seemed to object, I would think socialism is deeply problematic. Because that posts amounts to a kinder, gentler and also far less unhinged version of the same Jesuitical communionism (to use Draper's term) advocated by other members. And that's not socialism.

Well, thank you for reconsidering. This is an interesting discussion. And yes, this has to do with what is and what is not socialism.

But if I thought I was perhaps being too harsh, this post dissuaded me. We all get the reference. But the reference is completely irrelevant; Lenin was talking about historic events. Now, the life span of humans is not measured in the number of historic events they are likely to experience. It is measured in boring old clock-time, physicists' time. The average member of this site, I imagine, has forty to fifty years before they become a corpse. To say that we will all die before the end of class society is to postpone socialism for some fifty years, at least. And despite the "clever" reference, it makes socialism some sort of idle dream. Good luck finding the worker who is willing to fight for something that might happen in the distant future.

I think you fundamentally misunderstand things here.

Communism will happen in a distant future. Such "distant future" could be, for instance, 2020. Or 2237. What makes it "distant" is not the amount of time, but the amount of human activity that stands between us and communism.

Conversely, the demise of capitalism is at hand. It could happen at any moment now. And that moment could be, say, 2020. Or 2237.

Unfortunately for this narrative, Pablo lost control of the International Secretariat far before the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union. His brief period of political ascendancy was mainly in the fifties. By the sixties, when the Soviet Union seemed unlikely to go anywhere for, perhaps, centuries, his support had evaporated and Mandel and Frank took over the day-to-day operations of the IS, and by '65 they were able to erase Pablo and his remaining base of support, the minuscule African Bureau that looked to him more as a supporter of the FLN than a socialist theoretician.

Yes, but to the extent that the SU had any credibility as a "model" for "socialism", it was adequately represented within the working class movement by Stalinism itself; there was little need for a "auxiliary line" that wasn't minimally critical of the "deformed workers' State".

Indeed, Pabloism, the honest variant that no one follows anymore, or the Mandelite variant suitably alloyed with Maoist imagery and so on, like other forms of opportunism, arises from the class struggle; or rather, from the layer that always acts to spoil class struggle where it arises, the labour aristocracy and bureaucracy. What one sees on RevLeft more often than not is an imitation of opportunism.

Pabloism perhaps; but there are other forms of opportunism that arise directly from disconnection to class struggle. In other words, there is one widespread opportunist tendency that is expressed in mass parties, and is linked to labour aristocracy/bureaucracy, and their attempts to establish themselves as "brokers" in class struggle. There is another opportunist tendency that has little to do with labour aristocracy, and is more directly rooted in the petty-bourgeoisie and its "reacionary socialist" attempts to substitute for the working class as a revolutionary subject. This latter tendency thrives in denial of the real movement, and is expressed in cults and cliques that fancy themselves the "vanguard" of the proletariat - or even of an abstract "historical necessity".

Even so, use-values that function solely as markers of class distinction are rare. Gold foil, when used in food, is an example of such a use-value. But high-quality transportation, time-keeping, clothing and so on has utility quite independent of its use to mark its owner as belonging to a certain class. When the latter function withers away, the former remains. Likewise mirrors, which were used in Yayoi-period Japan to mark status (and were rarely used "properly"), continued to be used (in their mundane function) even after advances in bronze-working led to their symbolic function all but dying out.

This assumes an acritical view of what "high quality" is. In a capitalist society, a "high quality" transportation is one in which upper middle class yuppies can go from home to office without having to mingle with proletarian or lumpen proletarian types.

Cocaine is associated with several negative feedback mechanisms, as are the vast majority of substances that influence the nervous system in some way. I would have thought this is common knowledge. That people still consume cocaine, or alcohol, or what have you, in amounts that jeopardise their health, is for the most part due to social conditions. Cars don't come with biological feedback mechanisms, but there are definite feedback mechanisms associated with traffic jams. That many people still decide to use cars despite this negative feedback is due, not to some insidious desire of men to overconsume, but due to the cutting of all public services, including public transport, and the pressures associated with wage labour.

Where I live in, most people don't have the luxury of opting between public transportation and privately owned cars - they have to go to their jobs by bus or by bus, or, if they are lucky enough, by metro (but even then many need a bus to get from home to the metro station, or from the metro station to work place, or both).

And so, public transportation cannot be "cut" in the way you seem to imply (besides, albeit being "public" transportation, it is also very private business, exploited in a very capitalistic way by it own petty robber barons).

So we are either talking from very different social realities, or one of us is badly misunderstanding the inner workings of capitalist mega-cities.

The point is to transform the way in which humans expend their labour-power. This includes both the abolition of every individual having a fixed sphere of activity, and the social abolition of menial work - which means, not that industrial robots will not have to be supervised by humans, but that the relation between this sort of work and intellectual etc. labour will fundamentally change. None of this can be done from the home, which is good unless you think it a good idea for people to be shut up in their households (ugh).

Uh, no.

I suppose people will move around a lot; after all there are lots of interesting places to go, such as museums, libraries, danceterias, restaurants, stadiums, parks (or the very transformed successor of what we call by those names in a capitalist society), etc.

It is merely that moving around from home to the place of collective torture we call "workplace" will quite probably be no longer necessary.

We can socialise directly with other people, for the sake of socialisation; we don't need the "workplace" and its alienated "socialisation" as a substitute for real human interaction. And that is part of why I agree with you that our disagreement involves, or is reducible to, a disagreement on what is communism (or "socialism" as you put it). To me, your "socialism" very much looks like an extention of the capitalist workplace to the society as a whole. A "socialism" in which production and productivity remain the goddesses to cultuate.

Of course they are. They are psychotic maniacs in public transportation, in queues and so on. Some of it is due to cars as such; given a long enough traffic hold-up anyone would start to lose nerves. But more important than that (or the rurals coming into the city etc.) are the social conditions of modern capitalism. The only people who can live in this decaying capitalism and not go manic at least occasionally are all insane.

Hm. So why are you avoiding driving, because you are manic, or because you are insane?

But who cares about reformist mayors? People on RevLeft have this touching devotion to social-democracy but one bourgeois politician is like all other bourgeois politicians. It is certainly no job of communists to defend them. The rest of this paragraph hinges on the idea that automobile transport must come at the expense of public transport and v.v. This is the case in capitalism where a city has a limited budget, but not in the socialist society, which plans production and infrastructure to fulfill need.

Of course this is still the case in a communist society. What you fail to realise is that communism is a post-scarcity society, not because you will be able to fit 1,000,000 automobiles measuring each 9 square meters into a street that is less than 9,000,000 square meters in area, but (among other things, of course) because a communist society will stop re-producing scarcity, while a capitalist society goes on and on creating and re-creating "necessities" that imply the over-use of natural resources, thus making those resources (or else the products made of them) "scarce".

Consumption in a capitalist society isn't "neutral" nor it stems out of "necessities". It is a social construction that is very much a part of capitalism as a system, and it requires a capitalist production in order to be fulfilled.

Obviously there is more than a little possibility for doing something else than handing factories to "their" workers. To do so, in fact, would be colossally misguided - it would mean the dispersal of the means of production when what is necessary is their centralisation. After the revolution, the factories will be run by the existing corporate enterprises, obviously, and whatever organs for coordinating production already exist. In Russia these were the main committees and the centres, for example. The point is to subordinate these in turn to the workers' state and to begin the application of the methods of scientific planning, to the extent possible in an area still trading on the global market (via an external trade monopoly).

Which has been tried, with the known results.

If the working class isn't ruling things at workplaces, then it quite certainly won't be ruling things at society at large.

You are stuck with a false dichotomy between "centralisation" and "decentraliation". Which leads you to proposing a curious mix between absolute centralisation of production, and an absolute decentralisation of consumption.

How does it change demand? It raises demand for producer goods, true, but that is something that needs to be calculated for the entire planning period. Noting that the aggregate demand for rubber in e.g. six months' time (one planning cycle) is such-and-such doesn't simply mean that we set the targets for the rubber factories at such-and-such plus a certain amount of buffer stock; it means we calculate how much oil is necessary to produce the rubber, how much electricity etc. Hence socialist planning is scientific - it relies on a scientific understanding of the production processes, of complex systems etc.

But evidently this means that "demand" must be planned too. If we reach the conclusion that the "demand" for rubber is unsustainable in the long term, we will have to plan for a replacement for rubber.

Indeed, this is probably another false dichotomy: demand/supply. Those are categories of capitalist economy, and I am far from sure that they still apply in a communist society.

No, such "destruction" is precisely the way to preserve them. To "destroy" luxury is akin to abolishing the state by forming a death squad targeting "statists". Luxury is abolished when it loses its distinction from other goods.

Again, the issue is not to physically destroy objects and products. The issue is to socially destroy the socially hierarchical roots of the "demand" for luxuries.

And since such social markers are available to anyone who wants them they lose their status as social markers, because they mark nothing. So after, perhaps, an initial slight spike in demand the demand stabilises or even rapidly deteriorates, depending on the good in question and if it is even a use-value outside class society.

More likely, those social markers will still mark social status, and be a point of support for the restauration of the old order.

This is a bizarre contention. Forming the initial list of circulating goods entails simply collating existing lists made by individual enterprises. From there adding items to the list is simply a matter of paperwork. To think this would somehow stifle progress is bizarre. Or do you think firms in the capitalist society don't need things like permits, and other forms of paperwork?

Well, it was your contention that innovation cannot be planned. Which, if true, would lead to such a consequence. Thankfully, innovation can be planned - and is already planned even within a capitalist society, where such planning takes the form of budgetary provisions for R&D.

Socialist society means the end of alienation in the strict Marxist sense, the alienation of the producer from the product. It does not mean a return to pre-capitalist forms of social organisation. In fact in the socialist society man is freer from other men than he has ever been, since the start of class society. He is not forced into any unfree association with other people, and what large-scale (but also voluntary) associations exist are for the purpose of coordinating production. If someone disapproves of the things he does, things he consumes, how he has sex, whatever, this does not impact him in the slightest. His bonds are for him to choose.

I think this is a libertarian fantasy. We are social animals, we are only human in society. We are going to be freer than ever, but that freedom is not freedom from one another, it is freedom for one another. It is not that we are "forced into unfree association with other people", it is that free association with other people is our species-being mode of existence.

Obviously there was, not only on account of the purely biological fact that it is not the same to expend energy and conserve it, but also because we see quite ingenious labour-saving techniques in the neolithic society (stone adzes, arrows, bows, pottery etc.) but not one leisure-saving technique.

Again, this is a projection of capitalist categories into primitive socialism.

You cannot preserve energy without expending it, and it seems to me that you have things upside down: the "expense" of energy in "labour" is what actually preserves energy, or, in more Marxian terms, reproduces it. While the "conservation" of energy in leisure is actually mere expense of energy, for the sake of it (or, perhaps more realistically, is actually part of "labour", pedagogical activity to prepare people for actual "productive" activities.

The material productivity of socialist production is chiefly the productivity of dead labour. To think that cretinous labour-intensive methods will survive in socialism is completely mistaken.

Listen, the "productivity" of dead labour is a function of living labour; and, conversely, the "productivity" of living labour is a function of dead labour. Which of these do you mean by "productivity of dead labour"?

If you mean the productivity of dead labour, then this is a function of living labour. A loom will produce more, or less, according to the quality, intensity, and duration of living labour put into it. And so we are in the realm of productivity-mania, characteristic of capitalism.

If you mean the productivity that is function of dead labour, ie, productivity of living labour, then yes, a given amount of human living webster-labour will produce more, or less, according to the quality and quantity of the looms, ie, dead labour, it operates on. But then we are again measuring how "productive" human beings are, as if we were nothing more than "factors or production", so this is a calculation that only makes sence as long as we are a cog more into the machine. Which is, a calculation that only makes sence in a capitalist economy.

And yes, the reproduction of the socialist society is not guaranteed. In fact we can expect birth rates to sharply fall. But what of it? Socialism isn't magic; it places the decision in hands of human beings, not ossified social structures. If no one wants to continue the race, so be it. No one will be harmed by that.

So we have a planned economy, in which every single part of the process of production is "scientifically" planned (for what end?) But there is an essential part of the plan that cannot be planned, which is labour imputs, that must remain absolutely free, and are only subject to individual wishes and decisions. See how this is contradictory?

And you, Luis, what are you going to do about it? Where are you going to find the workers who will let you prevent them from using contraception? And why stop at contraception? Why not outlaw homosexuality and abortion too? You sneer at anarcho-Stalinism, but you wish to reserve to yourself the prerogative to out-vozhd the vozhd when it comes to family-mongering.

Hm, no.

I am sure that at some level of depopulation, class relations will be reinstated; a too small society cannot support communist relations (and an even smaller society cannot support capitalist relation, and so on, until we are back to primitive socialism.

A few years ago there was a little piece of spam circulating in the internet, about how the world would look like if its population was reduced to 100 people. The most comic (involutarily comic, that is) part of it was that if the world had only 100 inhabitants, there would be only one college graduate among them. Which college would that single graduate would have his or her alma mater, that must remain forever a mistery, for it is obvious that it takes more than 100 people for a college to make. The same is true for each and every human activity; too small populations make hydro plants, automobile plants, tobacco farms, the internet, shipyards, rock bands, etc., inviable.

But long before becoming inviable, those things would become dependent on surplus labour extorted by violence or economic necessity.

So it is not that "I" (who will probably for starters be long dead) am willing to outvozhd the vozhd in family mongering (for starters because I don't think anything similar to "families" will be in place), but that if "socialism" is a "planned economy", then either you will have to plan for labour imputs, or you will have an incomplete and inconsistent plan. Conversely, if you don't want to plan for labour imputs in order to avoid some sort of natalism, then you must have an unplanned economy, or not have an "economy" at all.

If there is a demand, the socialist society organises to meet it. Even if the demand is not quantitatively high, it is more efficient to build a large-scale production unit so that the supply is able to scale.

This is again capitalist reasoning projected into communism. We should have huge facilities to produce almost useless things, in order to "save labour". But free "labour", or work, needs no "saving"; it is just the free activity of men and women freely interacting with their "natural laboratory", not a "factor of production".

And so, you are right. What you call "socialism" is not what I call communism, and conversely.

Luís Henrique

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

1st November 2015, 16:13

I think you fundamentally misunderstand things here.

Communism will happen in a distant future. Such "distant future" could be, for instance, 2020. Or 2237. What makes it "distant" is not the amount of time, but the amount of human activity that stands between us and communism.

Conversely, the demise of capitalism is at hand. It could happen at any moment now. And that moment could be, say, 2020. Or 2237.

It's not that I've misunderstood, but that you're backtracking. You said that in communism, we will all be dead. Now, either:

(1) you know something about our health that we don't, in which case, spit it out, man;
(2) you think the revolution will happen far enough from the present that we will all be dead; or
(3) you think the period of transition will last long enough that we will all be dead by the time it's over.

With the exception of option number (1), which is just worrying, all of this makes socialism a matter of idle speculation.

Yes, but to the extent that the SU had any credibility as a "model" for "socialism", it was adequately represented within the working class movement by Stalinism itself; there was little need for a "auxiliary line" that wasn't minimally critical of the "deformed workers' State".

Now, let's not sell Pablo short. After all, Pabloism was an ingenious invention when one wanted to express support both to Stalinism and to social-democratic, nationalist and military governments hostile to Stalinism. In addition, Pablo was a bureaucrat, but he was no thug, so while participating in a Stalinist party was a high-risk endeavour that might end with an unfortunate fall down a flight of stairs, the worst one had to fear from Raptis-Pablo was a bureaucratic expulsion, which I am led to believe doesn't hurt as much.

Pabloism perhaps; but there are other forms of opportunism that arise directly from disconnection to class struggle. In other words, there is one widespread opportunist tendency that is expressed in mass parties, and is linked to labour aristocracy/bureaucracy, and their attempts to establish themselves as "brokers" in class struggle. There is another opportunist tendency that has little to do with labour aristocracy, and is more directly rooted in the petty-bourgeoisie and its "reacionary socialist" attempts to substitute for the working class as a revolutionary subject. This latter tendency thrives in denial of the real movement, and is expressed in cults and cliques that fancy themselves the "vanguard" of the proletariat - or even of an abstract "historical necessity".

Oh, and where might these opportunist groups that arise independently from the labour bureaucracy and aristocracy be found?

This assumes an acritical view of what "high quality" is. In a capitalist society, a "high quality" transportation is one in which upper middle class yuppies can go from home to office without having to mingle with proletarian or lumpen proletarian types.

A cardboard box on wheels would fulfill the same function.

Now, of course, cardboard boxes are not waterproof, they're not particularly stable, and pushing one down the street would be a hassle. In other words, their quality leaves something to be desired. I think this is clear to everyone; the quality of objects (in reference to some immediate function; after all a quality geologist's hammer is an exceedingly poor sledgehammer and vice versa) is real enough, and it is not equivalent to their function. A quality sledgehammer is not one which breaks down rocks and whatever people do with a sledgehammer; it's one that does it well.

I'm also highly amused by the fact that not wanting to "mingle" with other people in public transportation has become a high crime now. Why this prurient obsession with how people live their lives? It's easy to wail on businessmen but show me one worker who wouldn't, at least occasionally, like to get away from the overcrowded public transportation, with questionable heating policies, people who haven't washed since the fall of the Soviet Union, bacilli everywhere, tired and rude people etc. Yes, many workers are forced to take public transportation everywhere. But the lifestyle of workers under capitalism is shit, it's not something to be glorified and prettified, and when we're faced with the comforts of bourgeois life, the socialist answer is not to sneer but to ask how workers can attain the same sort of material comfort and affluence.

Where I live in, most people don't have the luxury of opting between public transportation and privately owned cars - they have to go to their jobs by bus or by bus, or, if they are lucky enough, by metro (but even then many need a bus to get from home to the metro station, or from the metro station to work place, or both).

And so, public transportation cannot be "cut" in the way you seem to imply (besides, albeit being "public" transportation, it is also very private business, exploited in a very capitalistic way by it own petty robber barons).

So we are either talking from very different social realities, or one of us is badly misunderstanding the inner workings of capitalist mega-cities.

I consider myself reasonably familiar with the workings of large cities, having lived in several of them and having visited even more. You, as I recall it, live somewhere in Brazil. It seems odd that you would deny that public transportation is being cut, when just a few years ago there were massive protests over price hikes, which were resolved by, among other things, the public transportation company wowing to cut costs. The fate of public transport in America is another obvious reference point.

Does that cause problems for capitalists in the long run? Sure, it might, but capitalists live in the short term. That is why capitalism periodically needs measures to save itself from the stupidity of capitalists (if capitalists were compelled to plan for the long term, we would undoubtedly be living in some sort of Stapledonian global cartel). The capitalist, according to popular stereotype, would sell his mother. Fair enough. But he would then come home and wonder why his mother isn't there.

Uh, no.

I suppose people will move around a lot; after all there are lots of interesting places to go, such as museums, libraries, danceterias, restaurants, stadiums, parks (or the very transformed successor of what we call by those names in a capitalist society), etc.

It is merely that moving around from home to the place of collective torture we call "workplace" will quite probably be no longer necessary.

We can socialise directly with other people, for the sake of socialisation; we don't need the "workplace" and its alienated "socialisation" as a substitute for real human interaction. And that is part of why I agree with you that our disagreement involves, or is reducible to, a disagreement on what is communism (or "socialism" as you put it). To me, your "socialism" very much looks like an extention of the capitalist workplace to the society as a whole. A "socialism" in which production and productivity remain the goddesses to cultuate.

Yet oddly enough I, the supposed productivist, cultist etc., am saying that the reproduction of the socialist society, and individual consumption, are a matter of the free decision of members of that society, whereas you invoke the quite frankly semi-fascist idea that the socialist society might ban something as basic as contraception because not enough brats are being born.

In any case, the things that will need to be done in socialist society can't be done from home by any stretch of the imagination. Can you smelt steel at home? What an odd place you live in, then. And even if you can, are you going to smelt steel all your life or move every time you want to change tasks, which would surely be several times a day? It doesn't add up at all.

Hm. So why are you avoiding driving, because you are manic, or because you are insane?

I believe I have already answered; I don't have the nerves for it. Back in the seventies my grandfather used to carry a sledgehammer in his backpack, for (1) illegally harvesting date mussels, and (2) settling road incidents. By all accounts, I'm extremely similar to my grandfather if a bit more, ah, filled-out, and less calm. So until they allow me to drive a tank (this is another reason why I should never drive) I grind my teeth and share trams with our pensioners.

Now it's nonetheless true that life in capitalism drives men that are much more stable than me to rage. Small wonder, given that the necessity to keep the rate of profit high means that workers have to be ground down to extract every last drop of profit from them, while simultaneously giving back less and less. So we have road rage accidents, and people crashing airplanes and so on.

Of course this is still the case in a communist society. What you fail to realise is that communism is a post-scarcity society, not because you will be able to fit 1,000,000 automobiles measuring each 9 square meters into a street that is less than 9,000,000 square meters in area, but (among other things, of course) because a communist society will stop re-producing scarcity, while a capitalist society goes on and on creating and re-creating "necessities" that imply the over-use of natural resources, thus making those resources (or else the products made of them) "scarce".

Consumption in a capitalist society isn't "neutral" nor it stems out of "necessities". It is a social construction that is very much a part of capitalism as a system, and it requires a capitalist production in order to be fulfilled.

Communism is a post-scarcity society because the productive forces have developed to such an extent that the existing natural limits on resources are irrelevant. If we accept your notion, however, that overcoming scarcity is a matter of restricting demand, then it would seem the US-backed Khmer Rouge statelet was a post-scarcity society. After all, demands apart from basic demands for rice, clothes and so on were all suppressed (as was contraception, guaranteeing the indefinite reproduction of the glorious Democratic Kampuchea post-scarcity society), and these basic needs were available in abundance (to some, but of course - the ones not getting the basic supplies were yuppies, with their decadent urban lifestyle).

Which has been tried, with the known results.

If the working class isn't ruling things at workplaces, then it quite certainly won't be ruling things at society at large.

You are stuck with a false dichotomy between "centralisation" and "decentraliation". Which leads you to proposing a curious mix between absolute centralisation of production, and an absolute decentralisation of consumption.

And yet, oddly enough, while there existed main committees and centres for production, and while the old firms continued to exist in some areas of the Soviet economy, all overseen by the VSNKh, the workers ruled in Soviet Russia. Whereas when individual groups of workers were given leave to lord over "their" workplaces in Algeria, the ruling group was the bourgeoisie.

Socialists no more advocate the centralisation of production than we advocate gravity. Production already happens on a global scale. This scale is incompatible with nationally-delimited capitalist ownership, and the anarchy of the market, which is why capitalism can be replaced tomorrow with a planned production. On the other hand, consumption is largely individual. Again, this is a fact.

But evidently this means that "demand" must be planned too. If we reach the conclusion that the "demand" for rubber is unsustainable in the long term, we will have to plan for a replacement for rubber.

Indeed, this is probably another false dichotomy: demand/supply. Those are categories of capitalist economy, and I am far from sure that they still apply in a communist society.

The conclusion doesn't follow. And if you can make sense of production without demand driving production, good for you. The only attempts I've seen, oddly enough on this site, all amounted to a mystic "production for production's sake" malarkey.

More likely, those social markers will still mark social status, and be a point of support for the restauration of the old order.

If socialism fails because someone ordered a glass of champagne it bloody well deserved to fail, then. One would think we were talking about a delicate glass figurine, which must not be upset from its precarious balance, and not a historically stable mode of production. And again, despite your sneering at Stalinists, this is essentially a Maoist theory - that capitalism is restored not because of the failure of the world revolution but because the proles are uninterested in ascetic sacrifice on behalf of their "socialist" leaders.

Well, it was your contention that innovation cannot be planned. Which, if true, would lead to such a consequence. Thankfully, innovation can be planned - and is already planned even within a capitalist society, where such planning takes the form of budgetary provisions for R&D.

Expenditure on R&D does not guarantee innovation, obviously. Otherwise, the entire argument is one giant non-sequitur. Innovation produces new kinds of goods. But then it's simply a matter of including these goods in the next planning cycle. You seem to have tremendous difficulty understanding something, but I don't know what it is.

I think this is a libertarian fantasy. We are social animals, we are only human in society. We are going to be freer than ever, but that freedom is not freedom from one another, it is freedom for one another. It is not that we are "forced into unfree association with other people", it is that free association with other people is our species-being mode of existence.

Oh, spare us the poetry, it doesn't mean anything. One of the basic points of Marxist thought is the substitution of the compulsory association characteristic of class society with free association. That is the point. You're invoking impressionist anthropology to muddle this fundamental point.

So we have a planned economy, in which every single part of the process of production is "scientifically" planned (for what end?) But there is an essential part of the plan that cannot be planned, which is labour imputs, that must remain absolutely free, and are only subject to individual wishes and decisions. See how this is contradictory?

It's only contradictory if you think planning of production involves humans obtaining divine powers to control the entirety of their material environment. It does not. (In fact, for gods there is no planned production; if planning of production is like solving an equation, having these divine powers to set demand, labour, climate, solar activity, winds etc. is like controlling all of the quantities in an equation, rendering it meaningless and empty.) Humans are in a definite material environment and will plan their response to that environment, in terms of goods moved and targets communicated (the only thing that the stateless socialist society can do), so that their demand for goods is satisfied.

I am sure that at some level of depopulation, class relations will be reinstated; a too small society cannot support communist relations (and an even smaller society cannot support capitalist relation, and so on, until we are back to primitive socialism.

Yes, because population is a slider, and the mode of production depends on how the slider has been set. Why, think of all the feudal societies that fell back into a slave economy with depopulation, and all those slave economies that reverted to primitive communalism because there weren't enough people. And of course past modes of production can simply be resurrected, that's how history works after all.

LuÃs Henrique

3rd November 2015, 14:21

It's not that I've misunderstood, but that you're backtracking. You said that in communism, we will all be dead.

See, there are two very different things that make up the time between us and communism:

the time within capitalism, before a revolution that destroys the bourgeois State;
the time it takes for a society that has undergone 1. above to transition between capitalism and communism.

I agree with you that 2. is going to be relatively short. How much time, I don't know, but I would say a few years (as in, five or six, not as in 72, or Pablo's "centuries of deformed worker States"). I very much doubt it is going to be just a week or a month, either. If it takes much longer, then odds are that there is no transition at all, or that it is a transition into something else than communism.

I also don't know how much time will be 1. But considering that the only social force that can effect a revolution that destroys the bourgeois State is the working class, and considering the complete disarray of such class, I am not overly optimistic. And so, I do not think most of us will be alive when we finally achieve communism. But I could certainly be wrong; as I said, or rather as Lenin said, time isn't necessarily measured in years, centuries or seconds.

So my comment that we won't be alive when communism "comes" should be taken as that, not as a theoretical position that the transition to communism will, or should, or even could, take more time than an ordinary human life.

Still, communism, when finally implemented, will mean a quite radical change in the way people are socialised. As you say, nuclear families will go bye-bye, so we will have people not raised by nuclear families (as a mass phenomenon; I am aware that the nuclear family is already in crisis, and that a few people are already being raised differently) coming of age at least twenty years after the revolution that destroys the bourgeois State. Probably more, since nuclear families are more likely to "wither away" than to be banned altogether by the DotP. These people, I think, will have a very different outlook than we have - than even the most radical and far sighted revolutionaries among us actually have. And at the time they are able to take the lead in the managing of society, most of us will be dead. I quite certainly will, even if the revolution that destroys the bourgeois States happens tommorrow and the transition to communism is particularly short and nuclear families go out of fashion really quickly and people raised already under communism are able to take the lead in social matters before their 30's.

Now, communism isn't an ideology, or a mode of reproduction of people; it is a mode of production, so this change in the way people are socialised shouldn't count as part of the "transition between capitalism and communism".

Does this mean that I should despair and give up the struggle against capital and the bourgeois State?

I would say no. While I certainly would like to see a completely transformed society, and while I think it is a pity (and further proof of the inexistence of God) that I certainly won't be able to, the sence of my life is structured around such struggle. Other people will win this fight; I hope that I have contributed, and will still contrubute, a little bit for such victory, and that is good, even if I die without seeing the final result.

Which is what most humans do, regardless of what they dedicate their lives to. We know that our life is short, we know that others will continue the struggle for communism (the effort to eradicate malaria, the search for a cure for AIDS or the Theory of Everything, the plans to conquer Moon or Mars, the development of flying cars or intelligent computers, the making or blue or black roses, whatever), and so we continue.

Now, let's not sell Pablo short. After all, Pabloism was an ingenious invention when one wanted to express support both to Stalinism and to social-democratic, nationalist and military governments hostile to Stalinism. In addition, Pablo was a bureaucrat, but he was no thug, so while participating in a Stalinist party was a high-risk endeavour that might end with an unfortunate fall down a flight of stairs, the worst one had to fear from Raptis-Pablo was a bureaucratic expulsion, which I am led to believe doesn't hurt as much.

Agree. I don't think I said or implied otherwise.

Oh, and where might these opportunist groups that arise independently from the labour bureaucracy and aristocracy be found?

Here: http://www.broadleft.org/.

Most that are not under the categories of "Social Democracy", "Green and Alternative" or "Democratic Socialism and Reform Communism", which are more likely to be the more mainstream, mass-oriented, kind of reformism-opportunism.

I'm also highly amused by the fact that not wanting to "mingle" with other people in public transportation has become a high crime now. Why this prurient obsession with how people live their lives?

Sure, there is nothing wrong with a little private apartheid, for those who cannot fathom the idea of having to be in unfree association with Blacks.

show me one worker who wouldn't, at least occasionally, like to get away from the overcrowded public transportation, with questionable heating policies, people who haven't washed since the fall of the Soviet Union, bacilli everywhere, tired and rude people etc.

Well, and who hasn't dreamt of taps that provide milk and honey and wine, instead of just water, or of an harem of 72 virgins (or, perhaps preferably, non-virgins), or of the perpetuum mobile, or of the Philosopher's Stone and immortality. Of the Land of Cockaigne, for short.

But "Lamborghinis for everybody" won't make an "efficient" transportation system, unless somehow "permanent traffic jams" is substituted for "speedy and comfortable commute from one place to another" in the definition of "efficient transportation".

I consider myself reasonably familiar with the workings of large cities, having lived in several of them and having visited even more. You, as I recall it, live somewhere in Brazil. It seems odd that you would deny that public transportation is being cut, when just a few years ago there were massive protests over price hikes, which were resolved by, among other things, the public transportation company wowing to cut costs. The fate of public transport in America is another obvious reference point.

This doesn't amount to "cuts", it amounts (at most; in the case of Brazil, it is more attack on wages, of which a greater proportion has to go to transportation, than anything else) to privatisation. And frankly, the idea that workers are substituting cars for buses because the latter are unavailable or more expensive strikes me as absurd.

Stapledonian

Interesting reference; I didn't know that author. Thank you.

Yet oddly enough I, the supposed productivist, cultist etc., am saying that the reproduction of the socialist society, and individual consumption, are a matter of the free decision of members of that society

What I am pointing is to a remarkable inconsistency within your reasoning: absolute centralisation of production, combined with absolute decentralisation of consumption (wich is inviable, because production and consumption are two sides of the same coin, even individual consumption being not more than re-production of labour power).

And now you make another conflation: between "free" decision, and "individual" decision. But actually "free" "economic" decisions cannot be individual, for the individual choices of each member of society have implications for other individual members. Meaning, in short, that if every member of society decides to go to "work" (or elsewhere, whatever that elsewhere could be) by Lamborghini, no one is going to be able to arrive at their destination on time.

whereas you invoke the quite frankly semi-fascist idea that the socialist society might ban something as basic as contraception because not enough brats are being born.

No, I don't "invoke" that idea; I am saying that it is a necessary consequence of your reasoning - and that without that, your reasoning is inconsistent.

To produce a loaf of bread, you need given amounts of flour, water, yeast, and gas (or oil, or electricity, or coal, etc.), and oven-time. And you need a given amount of human time, be it in the direct preparation of the loaves, or in supervision of automatic preparation.

Your reasoning is that we will have a "scientific plan" to tell us how much flour, water, yeast, gas, and oven-time we need, but that that "scientific plan" leaves out the amount of human time.

And that is because, while you proclaim the iminent abolition of nuclear family, when you think about the re-production of labour power, you still think in terms of individual decisions pertaining to... nuclear families.

Evidently the production or consumption of contraceptives won't be "banned" in communism, but the reasoning is quite different: there was never shortage of human reproduction in any kind of human society (except, in a quite limited aspect, of "workers" in slavery-based societies). Even in capitalism, population grows, and in fact this uncontrolled growth is of more concern than a supposed reduction. This would be even truer in a communist society, where you don't need to think in terms of being, or not being, able to properly raise kids, given your economic conditions.

I believe I have already answered; I don't have the nerves for it. Back in the seventies my grandfather used to carry a sledgehammer in his backpack, for (1) illegally harvesting date mussels, and (2) settling road incidents. By all accounts, I'm extremely similar to my grandfather if a bit more, ah, filled-out, and less calm. So until they allow me to drive a tank (this is another reason why I should never drive) I grind my teeth and share trams with our pensioners.

Mkay. But it sounds that, according to you, in a capitalist society, you are either "manic", or "insane", which is kinda funny, unless you are trying to make the point that the functioning of a capitalist society is crazied of itself. Which I guess is on some level true, but then I think we miss the fact that most people are still "functional" within a capitalist society, while a significant minority is not, and is a source of concern.

Communism is a post-scarcity society because the productive forces have developed to such an extent that the existing natural limits on resources are irrelevant.

This, of course, cannot be true, since there are actual natural limits on resources that cannot be ignored, unless you are thinking of interplanetary colonisation (but even then, the amount of planets that are or can be made inhabitable is limited, as is time for space travel). No amount of development of the productive forces will transcend the fact that there are just so many gallons of water apt for human use in Earth.

If we accept your notion, however, that overcoming scarcity is a matter of restricting demand,

Of course it is not a matter of "restricting" demand, it is a matter of rationalising demand, which means that "demand" is to be taken as what it really is, ie, a social construct, not a god-given natural trans-historic imposition of "reality".

then it would seem the US-backed Khmer Rouge statelet was a post-scarcity society.

That statelet was quite obviously not post-scarcity; on the contrary, scarcity was imposed with an iron fist, and ideologically glorified as a sign of non-"decadence".

After all, demands apart from basic demands for rice, clothes and so on were all suppressed

They were repressed, not suppressed. People still demanded champagne, jewels, and luxury cars, they just were denied a plausible mechanism for the distribution - and additionally sentenced to death/life in "labour camps" if they dared to complain. In the end, even if their complaints were just for rice or clothes.

The conclusion doesn't follow. And if you can make sense of production without demand driving production, good for you.

Of course demand must drive production; but then social planning must drive demand, not individual decisions by nuclear families.

If socialism fails because someone ordered a glass of champagne it bloody well deserved to fail, then.

I don't see the problem with a glass of champagne. I see a problem with more glasses of champagne than the cultivable land can provide, and with more glasses of champagne than would reasobly allow people to still understand reality around them.

Oh, spare us the poetry, it doesn't mean anything. One of the basic points of Marxist thought is the substitution of the compulsory association characteristic of class society with free association. That is the point. You're invoking impressionist anthropology to muddle this fundamental point.

Yeah, but as mentioned above, that "free association" isn't "free" in the sence that we can choose being part of it or not. Someone is going to bake the bread I eat, and no, I don't get to have a different baker just because I am a racist that cannot eat bread baked by Blacks, or a misogynist that cannot eat bread baked by women in general, or menstruated women in particular. It is "free" because it is free of the delusions that impair our ability to understand social life within capitalism; it is free because it is free of the material and social limitations that are imposed by scarcity.

***********************

What you propose, when you talk of a "planned economy", and of a "scientific plan", is planned capitalism; that is the reason that capitalism is restored: because it was never destroyed first place. Yes, this is a consequence of the failure of international revolution, but the failure of international revolution does not doom the revolution of itself; it does that trough a series of quite material consequences that follow from that failure and impose themselves into the social workings of a "deformed workers State". Otherwise we would be back to what you criticise as "talking about a delicate glass figurine, which must not be upset from its precarious balance, and not a historically stable mode of production". Why wouldn't it follow Khrushchev programme of defeating capitalism through competition, if it is such a stable mode of production - moreover if we think that it can thrive even with a substantial reduction of human population?

Luís Henrique

LuÃs Henrique

5th November 2015, 20:01

This discussion is perhaps too abstract.

Let's pretend that we are members of that "scientific plan" committee.

Let's accept the idea that the level of development of productive forces under modern capitalism in Northern Italy (not Nepal or Uganda) is enough for us to transition easily to communism (ie, as you say, that communism is possible now).

Lamborghini employs some 800 workers to produce some 2,400 cars yearly. It takes three workers labouring a full year, 36 hours a week, to make a Lamborghini.

So what if we had a demand for 3,000,000,000 Lamborghinis (ie, a Lamborghini per adult in the whole world)? We would need 1,000,000,000 workers working for a full year in order to supply this demand. Which would mean, one in each three workers would have to produce Lamborghinis. That, considering that our "communism" does not affect the labour journey. We would have to put one third of the world work force to make Lamborghinis, and refuse them any reduction of labour journey. If we were to keep with communist promises of shortened labour hours, we would need more than those many workers; but even if we put all the labouring population of the world into the production of Lamborghinis, we would still need each worker to toil 12 hours a week.

Of course, it can be said we don't need 3,000,000,000 Lamborghinis a year (but why not, if "demand" is sovereign?) We would only need 3,000,000,000 Lamborghinis in total, and a reposition production that would be that number, divided by the useful life of our Lamborghinis. If they can be assumed to last for 30 years, then we would "only" need a yearly production of 100,000,000 Lamborghinis. Which could be produced by "just" 33,333,333 workers, labouring 36 hours a week.

But then the "demand" for one Lamborghini for each adult would take 30 years to be met. Of course, as members of the "scientific plan" committee, we deserve priority...

... and that's how capitalism starts to be restored.

Of course, things can be changed if we increase the productivity of the manufacturing of Lamborghinis. But then we will have a curious "communism" that is concerned with the development of the means of production, instead of people. Or, alternatively, the problem is with capitalism, that has not yet developed the productive forces to the level where we can have both communism and a Lamborghini for each adult inhabitant of the planet. And so, communism wouldn't be actually possible now, unless people did the unthinkable, ie, conformed their "demands" to what can be actually produced.

*****************************

Now, a Lamborghini Gallardo is a relatively small car, 4.3 meters long and 1.9 meters wide. They only occupy, consequently, 8.17 square meters. That's good news, because 3 billion of them could fit (immobile, and with no free space between them) in just some 25,000 square kilometers. We could park them all in Macedonia.

Unhappily, cars are only useful when they move, and they cannot move without leaving a considerable space between them. If they were to travel at 60 km per hour, they would need to allow a distance of 30 meters between them, longitudinal-wise, and of 1.5 meters latitudinal-wise. This means they need a total area of some 350,000 square kilometers to circulate all at the same time. That's a lot more, almost the area of Germany (indeed, more than the area of reunified Germany, if we realise that part of Germany is composed of lakes and rivers, in which cars cannot move). And this is moving at 60 km/h, which is almost a crime to do with a Lamborghini (top speed, 320 km/h).

Now, 350,000 square kilometers amount to streets 20 meters wide and some 17.5 million kilometers long. That's more than the sum of the total lenght of roads in the US, China, India, Brazil and Japan (which have the five longest roadway networks in the world); and it is more than a fourth or the lenght or roads in all of the world.

But perhaps what this means can best be understood by calculating what would happen in a huge city, such as São Paulo. With some 8,000,000 adult inhabitants, São Paulo would demand corresponding 8 million Lamborghinis; if they were to go into the streets simultanesouly, they would occupy some 120 thousand kilometers of streets. The municipality, however, only has 17 thousand kilometers of streets. Only one seventh of the total Lamborghini fleet would be able to take to the streets at any given time, and still be able to ride at 60 km/h. Alternatively, they could fit all in the streets, provided that they ride at 10 km/h. Which probably explains why this is already the average speed of urban traffic in São Paulo at the rush hours nowadays...

And so, again, the world cannot support both communism and Lamborghinism simultaneously. Either we have to further develop the productive forces, so that we have enough streets and roads to be used by 3 billion motorised people, or our "scientific plan" will have to rely on different means of transportation.

And so, Lamborghinis for everyone necessarily reintroduce scarcity. Even if the revolution is worldwide.

Luís Henrique

ckaihatsu

5th November 2015, 20:32

No Lambos for anyone, then? (sniff)

Really, though, I'd be interested on your take on the fact that Lambos *will exist*, so then what to do with them and/or anything else, as far as 'redistribution of wealth' goes -- ?

ckaihatsu

5th November 2015, 20:50

Over the years I've come across some odds-and-ends about the subject of transportation, and it can be downright fascinating, along with more of urban planning and anything else along those lines.

I recall something about the possible use of a Ferris-wheel-like machine, used with finely-weighted balancing, on the side of a roadway to lift vehicles from one level up to a higher one (the direction of the 'bays' on the arms of the wheel would be parallel to the respective roadways, one-on-top-of-the-other). In this way a bare minimum of energy would be required to counteract gravity all-at-once, with near-vertical lifting. Most of the vehicle's 'traveling' motion -- its miles -- would result just from harnessing gravity and making the journey always-downhill in motion.

That's just an aside, though -- my line on transportation is *conveyor belts*, preferably underground. Also t-shirt cannons, but big enough to fire a plastic shell containing merchandise or whatever, for through-air delivery.

cyu

6th November 2015, 00:14

Sewer Socialist

6th November 2015, 01:51

You know, a number of people have made posts that assume that individually -driven or -occupied cars must be individual owned. But this is not even the case today in capitalism. Car - sharing services work well even on the small scale they exist in today.

Cars also do things mass transit could not practically do: go to the middle of nowhere. I ride my bike out to the forest, too, sometimes, but it takes about 3 hours each way, and I live relatively close and am in good shape.

It seems pretty reasonable to think that national there will continue to be forests, that people will enjoy going to them, and that car-sharing well continue to be a convenient way to do it.

Certainly, existing transit systems are too car-centric, too congested with traffic, and dangerous. But I think they have some unique utility nonetheless.

Citizen

6th November 2015, 14:11

All cars will be self-driving. Traffic and traffic accidents will be a thing of the capitalist past. If you really want to ride one of the world's last authentic Lamborghini's, you'll have to queue up for it with everyone else, just like Netflix DVDs or tickets to the zoo. Meanwhile, our top scientist-artists will be designing the sexiest, recyclable four-wheeled machines imaginable to human mind.

LuÃs Henrique

6th November 2015, 14:30

No Lambos for anyone, then? (sniff)

Only Ferraris. Deal with it. Ferraris are red.

http://i.ndtvimg.com/auto/makers/10/63/ferrari-458-italia-01.jpg

Really, though, I'd be interested on your take on the fact that Lambos *will exist*, so then what to do with them and/or anything else, as far as 'redistribution of wealth' goes -- ?

You mean they already exist, and we won't set them afire just to "make total destroy"? Or you mean that their production won't be immediately discontinued?

Luís Henrique

ckaihatsu

7th November 2015, 00:22

Such bourgeois tastes ;)

To be honest, having bourgeois tastes while living in a capitalist society is to be expected and widespread. Our wants and desires are guided by capitalist advertising. I think Rafiq was pointing this out earlier - if the capitalist superstructure were eliminated, there's no telling how wants and desires would be different in the non-capitalist world.

If the concept of property were eliminated, there would no longer be a "market" for individually controlled vehicles that take you around, at least not associated with you in any long term sense - it might be something you use for one trip, then it's taken by someone right after to go somewhere else.

I imagine technology would be focused on how best to make everyone happy. For example, if you're with the right crowd, doing anything with them would be fun regardless of what you're doing, then there would be communications and transportation technology that helps you find the right people. Then it's just a matter of going where you fit.

The predictable rote 'social reality' (marketing / consumerism) line from cyu, right on schedule....

I'll gladly point out that while consumer tastes are indisputably 'massaged' by the prevailing, dominant mercantile / capitalist paradigm, these consumer goods, nonetheless, have definite *use value*, also indisputably.

Note the social-material position elucidated here, which is unavoidable:

You know, a number of people have made posts that assume that individually -driven or -occupied cars must be individual owned. But this is not even the case today in capitalism. Car - sharing services work well even on the small scale they exist in today.

Cars also do things mass transit could not practically do: go to the middle of nowhere. I ride my bike out to the forest, too, sometimes, but it takes about 3 hours each way, and I live relatively close and am in good shape.

It seems pretty reasonable to think that national there will continue to be forests, that people will enjoy going to them, and that car-sharing well continue to be a convenient way to do it.

Certainly, existing transit systems are too car-centric, too congested with traffic, and dangerous. But I think they have some unique utility nonetheless.

---

And here's the 'automation' direction / line:

All cars will be self-driving. Traffic and traffic accidents will be a thing of the capitalist past. If you really want to ride one of the world's last authentic Lamborghini's, you'll have to queue up for it with everyone else, just like Netflix DVDs or tickets to the zoo. Meanwhile, our top scientist-artists will be designing the sexiest, recyclable four-wheeled machines imaginable to human mind.

---

Only Ferraris. Deal with it. Ferraris are red.

[IMG]http://i.ndtvimg.com/auto/makers/10/63/ferrari-458-italia-01.jpg[IMG]

You mean they already exist, and we won't set them afire just to "make total destroy"? Or you mean that their production won't be immediately discontinued?

Dude, brah, I *need* a Lambo, 'cause I flipped my 'Vette -- !

= D

See, here's the thing -- sure, I could see a good percentage of 'civilization's artifacts being annihilated as part of the revolution, but, at some point, the newfound post-capitalist social order would just be *depriving itself* if it did away with *all* use-values from the capitalist past.

What's wrong with Lambos, Ferraris, or any other luxury item, really -- ?

Nothing.

People may want to *make use of* these things, post-private-property, so the real question isn't how to *physically* rid society of its despicable commodities of the past, but rather how to transform all exchange-value commodities into pure use-values, post-commodification.

My point remains about how a post-capitalist social order could realistically handle such 'semi-rare' goods / use-values in a consistently egalitarian way.

LuÃs Henrique

7th November 2015, 12:04

Dude, brah, I *need* a Lambo, 'cause I flipped my 'Vette -- !

Then what you need is a Ferrari. That, or a VW beetle.

See, here's the thing -- sure, I could see a good percentage of 'civilization's artifacts being annihilated as part of the revolution, but, at some point, the newfound post-capitalist social order would just be *depriving itself* if it did away with *all* use-values from the capitalist past.

What's wrong with Lambos, Ferraris, or any other luxury item, really -- ?

Nothing.

Their production is certainly unsustainable in the long run, as is their mass use as individual/nuclear familial vehicles.

People may want to *make use of* these things, post-private-property, so the real question isn't how to *physically* rid society of its despicable commodities of the past, but rather how to transform all exchange-value commodities into pure use-values, post-commodification.

My guess is that existing cars will remain personal property, until it becomes clear that having a personal car is lower quality transportation vis-a-vis real good public transportation. And that newly produced cars will be put at the disposal of the public for eventual use. That almost certainly will mean the production will need to be downsized; cars are extremely underused in the conditions of individual ownership.

Luís Henrique

cyu

7th November 2015, 13:14

ckaihatsu

7th November 2015, 18:36

Then what you need is a Ferrari. That, or a VW beetle.

Their production is certainly unsustainable in the long run, as is their mass use as individual/nuclear familial vehicles.

It's not that they'd have to be continually *produced*, it's about what to do with the ones (of whatever) that already *exist*. I'll go ahead and note that I have a treatment / approach for this:

tinyurl.com/additive-prioritizations

Better, I think, would be an approach that is more routine and less time-sensitive in prioritizing among responders -- the thing that would differentiate demand would be people's *own* prioritizations, in relation to *all other* possibilities for demands. This means that only those most focused on Product 'X' or Event 'Y', to the abandonment of all else (relatively speaking), over several iterations (days), would be seen as 'most-wanting' of it, for ultimate receipt.

My 'communist supply and demand' model, fortunately, uses this approach as a matter of course:

consumption [demand] -- Every person in a locality has a standard, one-through-infinity ranking system of political demands available to them, updated daily

consumption [demand] -- Basic human needs will be assigned a higher political priority by individuals and will emerge as mass demands at the cumulative scale -- desires will benefit from political organizing efforts and coordination

consumption [demand] -- A regular, routine system of mass individual political demand pooling -- as with spreadsheet templates and email -- must be in continuous operation so as to aggregate cumulative demands into the political process

http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?b=1174

I'm also realizing that this model / method of demand-prioritization can be used in such a way as to lend relative *weight* to a person's bid for any given product or calendar event, if there happens to be a limited supply and a more-intensive prioritization ('rationing') is called-for by the objective situation:

Since everyone has a standard one-through-infinity template to use on a daily basis for all political and/or economic demands, this template lends itself to consumer-political-type *organizing* in the case that such is necessary -- someone's 'passion' for a particular demand could be formally demonstrated by their recruiting of *others* to direct one or several of *their* ranking slots, for as many days / iterations as they like, to the person who is trying to beat-out others for the limited quantity.

Recall:

[A]ggregating these lists, by ranking (#1, #2, #3, etc.), is *no big deal* for any given computer. What we would want to see is what the rankings are for milk and steel, by rank position. So how many people put 'milk' for #1 -- ? How many people put 'steel' for #1 -- ? How many people put 'milk' for #2 -- ? And how many people put 'steel' for #2 -- ? (Etc.)

*This* would be socially useful information that could be the whole basis for a socialist political economy.

So, by extension, if someone was particularly interested in 'Event Y', they might undertake efforts to convince others to *donate* their ranking slots to them, forgoing 'milk' and 'steel' (for example) for positions #1 and/or #2. Formally these others would put 'Person Z for Event Y' for positions 1 and/or 2, etc., for as many days / iterations as they might want to donate. This, in effect, would be a populist-political-type campaign, of whatever magnitude, for the sake of a person's own particularly favored consumption preferences, given an unavoidably limited supply of it, whatever it may be.

My guess is that existing cars will remain personal property, until it becomes clear that having a personal car is lower quality transportation vis-a-vis real good public transportation. And that newly produced cars will be put at the disposal of the public for eventual use. That almost certainly will mean the production will need to be downsized; cars are extremely underused in the conditions of individual ownership.

I tend to agree here.

If you underestimate how much of our wants and desires are determined by advertisers, you haven't examined the advertising industry.

Sure we can say racists are only brainwashed to be racists, or that people of a certain religion are only brainwashed to be religious, or that soldiers are only brainwashed to want to kill Muslims or Westerners, but how do you know you haven't just been brainwashed to want to go to Disneyland, or to become a famous politician, or even brainwashed to want to be respected by your peers?

Because I can use introspection and then *tell* you so.

What you're indicating are social outcomes *on the whole*, meaning that some people will be more predisposed to being influenced in whatever direction, but our revolutionary politics, in particular, helps to make people self-aware of their social roles and objective position in society, bringing about class consciousness and the potential to internally rebuff any imperialist-type social conditioning.

LuÃs Henrique

9th November 2015, 19:38

If you underestimate how much of our wants and desires are determined by advertisers, you haven't examined the advertising industry.

Sure we can say racists are only brainwashed to be racists, or that people of a certain religion are only brainwashed to be religious, or that soldiers are only brainwashed to want to kill Muslims or Westerners, but how do you know you haven't just been brainwashed to want to go to Disneyland, or to become a famous politician, or even brainwashed to want to be respected by your peers?

The problem with that line of reasoning is that there are no "unwashed brains" anywhere. All of us are socialised, which means we are taught to be racists, or Catholics, or Serbian patriots, or to want to go to Disneyland or to want to become a politician or be respected by our peers. None of these things are "natural" - but there isn't anything "natural" that can be opposed to them.

Yes, our wishes are certainly heavily influenced by advertising - if advertising didn't influence our wishes, there would be no reason for the bourgeois who produce goods and services to share their surplus value with the bourgeois who produce advertising - but, short of a revolution that puts an end to advertising, there is nothing that can be done, except earnest effort to think - individually and collectively - about the consequences and premises of our desires.

Luís Henrique

LuÃs Henrique

9th November 2015, 20:20

It's not that they'd have to be continually *produced*, it's about what to do with the ones (of whatever) that already *exist*.

Those that already exist, and aren't used in the barricades, will remain what they are, I suppose, until they are eventually superceeded by high-quality public transportation. I don't see why they would be expropriated, in principle.

But to build a high-quality public transportation will need a lot of effort, conscious effort to provide all the populace with a system that allows people to go from their homes to wherever they may want to go.

Plus, discontinuing the productio of any product, in a capitalist society, mean unemployment for all involved in that production. To discontinue the production of Lamborghinis in a socialist society requires breaking with that logic - just because we don't need no Lamborghinis doesn't mean that the people who produce them, and earn a living out of that production, are "superfluous".

Because I can use introspection and then *tell* you so.

Oh, sure, but then that is the introspection of a "brainwashed" brain. You are right, of course, but the "theory" you are trying to refute has an inbuilt "irrefutability clause".

What you're indicating are social outcomes *on the whole*, meaning that some people will be more predisposed to being influenced in whatever direction, but our revolutionary politics, in particular, helps to make people self-aware of their social roles and objective position in society, bringing about class consciousness and the potential to internally rebuff any imperialist-type social conditioning.

That. The point will be to make distributive conflict a tool for rising social awareness.

Luís Henrique

ckaihatsu

9th November 2015, 20:57

Those that already exist, and aren't used in the barricades, will remain what they are, I suppose, until they are eventually superceeded by high-quality public transportation. I don't see why they would be expropriated, in principle.

You're twisting and turning and trying to wriggle out of acknowledging that *plenty* of pre-existing luxury goods will inevitably continue to physically exist after the revolution -- while paper 'wealth' will instantly become meaningless, any *tangible* goods will have to be physically / socially dealt with in one way or another. Would they uniformly be left to *rot* -- ? Would they all be proactively *destroyed* -- ? If 'expropriated', how would any such remaining goods be socially distributed -- ?

You've decided to be argumentative for some reason, having already forgotten this part:

My guess is that existing cars will remain personal property, until it becomes clear that having a personal car is lower quality transportation vis-a-vis real good public transportation. And that newly produced cars will be put at the disposal of the public for eventual use. That almost certainly will mean the production will need to be downsized; cars are extremely underused in the conditions of individual ownership.

I tend to agree here.

---

But to build a high-quality public transportation will need a lot of effort, conscious effort to provide all the populace with a system that allows people to go from their homes to wherever they may want to go.

Plus, discontinuing the productio of any product, in a capitalist society, mean unemployment for all involved in that production. To discontinue the production of Lamborghinis in a socialist society requires breaking with that logic - just because we don't need no Lamborghinis doesn't mean that the people who produce them, and earn a living out of that production, are "superfluous".

I never claimed that any segment of the population is / would-be 'superfluous'.

Also, you're mixing capitalist and post-capitalist contexts here.

Oh, sure, but then that is the introspection of a "brainwashed" brain. You are right, of course, but the "theory" you are trying to refute has an inbuilt "irrefutability clause".

Sure, there are no 'unwashed brains', in the sense that everyone exists in some kind of current social paradigm, with all of its pre-existing external influences, but even all of that doesn't negate my own self-awareness and personal sovereignty -- such as it is -- as an individual.

That. The point will be to make distributive conflict a tool for rising social awareness.

cyu

9th November 2015, 23:06

Would they uniformly be left to *rot* -- ? Would they all be proactively *destroyed* -- ? If 'expropriated', how would any such remaining goods be socially distributed -- ?

I would imagine any object would be ignored, unless it was relevant to someone's life in some way. Kind of like in the current culture, if you're inside a shop, and see something you have no interest in, you just continue walking. It is ignored because it is not relevant to your life. If it is relevant to your life, then you use it. If you see something that you consider threatening to your life, then you remove the threat.

Animals do the same to things they pass by ^^

If you're playing a MMORPG, you do that too ;)

ckaihatsu

10th November 2015, 03:05

I would imagine any object would be ignored, unless it was relevant to someone's life in some way. Kind of like in the current culture, if you're inside a shop, and see something you have no interest in, you just continue walking. It is ignored because it is not relevant to your life. If it is relevant to your life, then you use it. If you see something that you consider threatening to your life, then you remove the threat.

Animals do the same to things they pass by ^^

If you're playing a MMORPG, you do that too ;)

Well, this *is* interesting -- you're giving a 'civil society' type of response to a question / issue that's more 'productive' in character -- if we can conceive of a *global* post-capitalist coordination of production, then why not the same coordination for a 'redistribution of (tangible) wealth' -- ?

Given present-day technologies might there not be a worldwide 'put everything on eBay' (for free) type of push, at least, as a precursor to a fully socialized, post-commodity production and distribution -- ?

cyu

10th November 2015, 10:31

On a somewhat unconnected train of thought...

The internet is becoming an auxiliary brain for everyone who is connected. The more people who are connected, the more powerful this auxiliary brain becomes. The more connections each person has to this auxiliary brain, the more we are able to share our experiences with every other connected person.

At some point, if we so choose, we would in theory be able to "turn off" our own decision making process, and let some random pack of bored surfers from hivemind make all our decisions for us, while we just kind of go along for the ride - and only "take the wheel" when inspiration or rebellion strikes. The internet becomes a sort of A.I. advisor - except it isn't actually A.I. - more like a cyborg combination of both machine and human minds.

Not every decision the hivemind tries to make for us will be right - on the other hand, not every decision we try to make for ourselves will be right either, but given the combination of what the collective suggests, and thinking for yourself, it would be like having a trusted advisor always by your side. Even if there were one person who you consider to be the wisest advisor you could ever have, once you merge him with the rest of your internet inner circle, then the whole becomes wiser than any individual advisor you could possibly have - and it would be accessible everywhere the hivemind has managed to extend itself.

ckaihatsu

10th November 2015, 13:35

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

10th November 2015, 16:27

See, there are two very different things that make up the time between us and communism:

the time within capitalism, before a revolution that destroys the bourgeois State;
the time it takes for a society that has undergone 1. above to transition between capitalism and communism.

I agree with you that 2. is going to be relatively short. How much time, I don't know, but I would say a few years (as in, five or six, not as in 72, or Pablo's "centuries of deformed worker States"). I very much doubt it is going to be just a week or a month, either. If it takes much longer, then odds are that there is no transition at all, or that it is a transition into something else than communism.

I also don't know how much time will be 1. But considering that the only social force that can effect a revolution that destroys the bourgeois State is the working class, and considering the complete disarray of such class, I am not overly optimistic. And so, I do not think most of us will be alive when we finally achieve communism. But I could certainly be wrong; as I said, or rather as Lenin said, time isn't necessarily measured in years, centuries or seconds.

So my comment that we won't be alive when communism "comes" should be taken as that, not as a theoretical position that the transition to communism will, or should, or even could, take more time than an ordinary human life.

Still, communism, when finally implemented, will mean a quite radical change in the way people are socialised. As you say, nuclear families will go bye-bye, so we will have people not raised by nuclear families (as a mass phenomenon; I am aware that the nuclear family is already in crisis, and that a few people are already being raised differently) coming of age at least twenty years after the revolution that destroys the bourgeois State. Probably more, since nuclear families are more likely to "wither away" than to be banned altogether by the DotP. These people, I think, will have a very different outlook than we have - than even the most radical and far sighted revolutionaries among us actually have. And at the time they are able to take the lead in the managing of society, most of us will be dead. I quite certainly will, even if the revolution that destroys the bourgeois States happens tommorrow and the transition to communism is particularly short and nuclear families go out of fashion really quickly and people raised already under communism are able to take the lead in social matters before their 30's.

All of this ignores that human consciousness is not static, but is acted upon by various material factors, including the organisation of the productive forces. Therefore, rather than communism (or "full" communism, which is a rather nonsensical example of hashtag-speak, rescued from the bin of the old Daily Worker) requiring some sort of superhuman breed, it will require "only" the working class, which will transform itself as it transforms society.

Now, communism isn't an ideology, or a mode of reproduction of people; it is a mode of production, so this change in the way people are socialised shouldn't count as part of the "transition between capitalism and communism".

Does this mean that I should despair and give up the struggle against capital and the bourgeois State?

I would say no. While I certainly would like to see a completely transformed society, and while I think it is a pity (and further proof of the inexistence of God) that I certainly won't be able to, the sence of my life is structured around such struggle. Other people will win this fight; I hope that I have contributed, and will still contrubute, a little bit for such victory, and that is good, even if I die without seeing the final result.

Which is what most humans do, regardless of what they dedicate their lives to. We know that our life is short, we know that others will continue the struggle for communism (the effort to eradicate malaria, the search for a cure for AIDS or the Theory of Everything, the plans to conquer Moon or Mars, the development of flying cars or intelligent computers, the making or blue or black roses, whatever), and so we continue.

And we're back to everyone present dying before communism. You try to get out of this with an analogy, but the analogy is weak. We might not cure cancer tomorrow, or ever (certainly after one point - the point when cancer kills me, as I have a massive genetic predisposition - I won't care anymore). But our research into cancer is giving us tangible benefits right now. Many kinds of cancer that were a death sentence decades ago are manageable now. "The Theory of Everything" is, more or less, a journalists' fancy, but research into quantum theories of gravity etc. has given us new ways of solving nuclear problems (for example).

Not so with socialism. In its heyday, socialism might have promised some immediate reforms to be won before the conquest of power, but at present, in this era of decaying capitalism, the only force capable of wresting reforms from the bourgeoisie is a powerful and militant proletariat - and this in turn requires the militancy to be generalised, to the point where the question of power is posed, or to dissipate, at which point all the reforms won will be withdrawn (as had happened in the seventies and the eighties).

So if socialism is something that happens after we are all dead, and struggling for socialism can't give us any tangible benefits in this world, what's the point? Obviously then the most we can hope for is some sort of unhappy marriage between the "socialism" of the "Socialist" International and the corporatism of the PRI.

Here: http://www.broadleft.org/.

Most that are not under the categories of "Social Democracy", "Green and Alternative" or "Democratic Socialism and Reform Communism", which are more likely to be the more mainstream, mass-oriented, kind of reformism-opportunism.

This won't do.

Opportunist groups like the Lambertists might not be a mass party (because no one wants to join them), but this does not mean they are independent from the influence of the labour aristocracy and bureaucracy. Quite the contrary. Lambert might have written tomes on "globalisation" and got the approval of Healy and Cannon, but what really kept his group afloat was their close relationship with the Force Ouvriere. Likewise, in the US, the ACFI/WL/SEP of Wohlforth, Mazelis and North was close to the AFL-CIO bureaucracy, who they begged for years to form a labour party on the British model.

Sure, there is nothing wrong with a little private apartheid, for those who cannot fathom the idea of having to be in unfree association with Blacks.

This is the sort of rhetoric one expects to find on tumblr, not a site ostensibly dedicated to serious discussion on socialism. I don't think you believe in it yourself; you're posting it much as a squid excretes ink. But even taken at face value, it's completely unconvincing. There are numerous reasons, none of which have anything to do with racism, why one might prefer to travel alone. If I were to use the same tumblresque rhetoric you use I would accuse you of advocating public transport so that women can get molested. But that would be a punch below the belt; more importantly it would be completely stupid.

Besides, obviously racial discrimination is impossible in public transportation. No, wait, I'm a crazy liar, it's more than possible, and it happens even today. I've personally seen bus drivers who would stop and open the doors for a Croat pensioner, but refuse to do the same for a Roma woman. This is not an argument against public transport, of course; it's an argument against the relations of production that engender a virulent anti-Roma racism in Eastern Europe.

Also, why do you imagine black people want to share public transportation with racists? Speaking as a gay man, a situation that is somewhat analogous, the fact that homophobes might not want to share transportation with me is not exactly high on my list of daily complaints. Quite the contrary, if they want to segregate themselves, let them, preferably into the life of the world to come, amen. The problem is not that some sort of socialist authority has not forced us to share public transportation (how?). The problem is that capitalist society is structurally homophobic, due to its reliance on the family. Likewise, capitalist society is structurally racist.

If by some freak accident there is a racist person in the socialist society, would society compel him to associate with black people? No; the socialist society is concerned with the administration of things and direction of the processes of production, not with the government of men. But how does this inconvenience the black members of the socialist society in any way? They live in a society where racism has been broken; one bitter old man (I am sure that, in the movie adaptation, he would be played by Clint Eastwood) doesn't have any impact on their lives.

Well, and who hasn't dreamt of taps that provide milk and honey and wine, instead of just water, or of an harem of 72 virgins (or, perhaps preferably, non-virgins), or of the perpetuum mobile, or of the Philosopher's Stone and immortality. Of the Land of Cockaigne, for short.

And do you see the problem here? You're equating things that are improbable or impossible with something that quite literally already exists.

But "Lamborghinis for everybody" won't make an "efficient" transportation system, unless somehow "permanent traffic jams" is substituted for "speedy and comfortable commute from one place to another" in the definition of "efficient transportation".

And if everyone eats a loaf of bread per day, we're all going to become massively ill. The question is, why do you think the consumption of members of the socialist society would follow this pattern? The underlying assumption - and indeed, the underlying assumption of many threads on RL - seems to be that "ordinary" consumers are simply too irrational to think in the long term, or to think at all. Now, let's assume that's true. If so, we're out of luck, as socialism means that the decisions about production will be made by "ordinary" people. If there is some sort of "enlightened" bureaucracy dictating to the workers what they may and what they may not consume, we're talking about something closer to the "bureaucratic collectivism" of the Shachtmanists - an impossibility.

This doesn't amount to "cuts", it amounts (at most; in the case of Brazil, it is more attack on wages, of which a greater proportion has to go to transportation, than anything else) to privatisation. And frankly, the idea that workers are substituting cars for buses because the latter are unavailable or more expensive strikes me as absurd.

It amounts to cutting of the public transport services, whether through privatisation or through the agency of a public company. It might strike you as "absurd" that more people are being forced to use cars as the quality of public transport deteriorates, but it's happening. Here, for example, the constant cuts to the public transport company (particularly the abolition of certain bus lines entirely) have forced many people to come to work in a car, even though that's extremely expensive.

What I am pointing is to a remarkable inconsistency within your reasoning: absolute centralisation of production, combined with absolute decentralisation of consumption (wich is inviable, because production and consumption are two sides of the same coin, even individual consumption being not more than re-production of labour power).

From the standpoint of the production process; definitely not from the standpoint of the individual consumer. But even in its role as the basis for reproduction of labour-power, individual consumption is something that takes care of itself. People are not likely to forget to eat and starve to death.

No, I don't "invoke" that idea; I am saying that it is a necessary consequence of your reasoning - and that without that, your reasoning is inconsistent.

Except you said more than that; you said the decision to produce contraception is a political one (as if politics exist in socialism). And that, combined with your earlier insistence that people who want assisted suicide be compelled to contact their family, leaves quite a poor impression.

To produce a loaf of bread, you need given amounts of flour, water, yeast, and gas (or oil, or electricity, or coal, etc.), and oven-time. And you need a given amount of human time, be it in the direct preparation of the loaves, or in supervision of automatic preparation.

Your reasoning is that we will have a "scientific plan" to tell us how much flour, water, yeast, gas, and oven-time we need, but that that "scientific plan" leaves out the amount of human time.

No, that's not correct at all. Estimates of the time necessary to produce certain objects and the labour, living or dead, requires, are necessary for planning, not just production but also transportation.

The difference is that, while the socialist society can order 10 tonnes of iron ingots to be shipped to the Touha Heavy Industries Plant in Tokyo, it can't order any member of society to work. And it can't order them to have a brat.

And that is because, while you proclaim the iminent abolition of nuclear family, when you think about the re-production of labour power, you still think in terms of individual decisions pertaining to... nuclear families.

This is another of your, ah, creative extrapolations. In fact, I think in terms of individual decisions pertaining to individuals, oddly enough. Whether a person with a uterus (sex and gender will, of course, lose all social significance in socialism) wants to get pregnant, give birth, abort at any point and so on - these are all individual decisions. Although given the sort of creepazoids we sometimes get in RL it wouldn't surprise me if someone on this site thinks women shouldn't be allowed (by who? the nonexistent socialist police?) to abort if the father doesn't agree with that decision.

Evidently the production or consumption of contraceptives won't be "banned" in communism, but the reasoning is quite different: there was never shortage of human reproduction in any kind of human society (except, in a quite limited aspect, of "workers" in slavery-based societies). Even in capitalism, population grows, and in fact this uncontrolled growth is of more concern than a supposed reduction. This would be even truer in a communist society, where you don't need to think in terms of being, or not being, able to properly raise kids, given your economic conditions.

Ah.

But on the other hand, dropping a sprog is not exactly pleasant; if, in the present class society, where women are oppressed by the institution of the family, women are coerced into giving birth, the same will obviously not happen in socialism. Particularly since the options available to women will drastically expand. We can probably expect a drastic drop in the birth rate, and an eventual stabilisation.

Mkay. But it sounds that, according to you, in a capitalist society, you are either "manic", or "insane", which is kinda funny, unless you are trying to make the point that the functioning of a capitalist society is crazied of itself. Which I guess is on some level true, but then I think we miss the fact that most people are still "functional" within a capitalist society, while a significant minority is not, and is a source of concern.

I have to joke from time to time, otherwise I can't finish these tedious large posts. And what you miss is the fact that functioning in a capitalist society includes a lot of anti-social behaviour. Some people close windows in trams during summer, some torture cats, some join a cult or a church. All of them are functioning in the sense that they get up in the morning, work, get wages and then repeat the same thing tomorrow. Obviously things will be different in the socialist society.

This, of course, cannot be true, since there are actual natural limits on resources that cannot be ignored, unless you are thinking of interplanetary colonisation (but even then, the amount of planets that are or can be made inhabitable is limited, as is time for space travel). No amount of development of the productive forces will transcend the fact that there are just so many gallons of water apt for human use in Earth.

I'm not talking about interplanetary colonisation (?). Obviously there is a finite amount of potable water on the planet. But this is irrelevant if - and this is the case, despite the occasional panic - we are never in danger of reaching that limit. There is likewise a finite amount of air on the planet, but that is irrelevant as we are never in danger of spending it all.

They were repressed, not suppressed. People still demanded champagne, jewels, and luxury cars, they just were denied a plausible mechanism for the distribution - and additionally sentenced to death/life in "labour camps" if they dared to complain. In the end, even if their complaints were just for rice or clothes.

Aha.

So, demand can be "suppressed", which is good, or "repressed", which is bad. The historical examples of governments (and that is precisely what this proposal would entail, a government) trying to modify demand are "repression" and can therefore be disregarded. Except you never tell us what "suppression" would entail. Your apparent ideological comrade-in-arms talked about mass rituals where Ferraris would be burned in a previous thread, which to my mind hints more at some sort of religious mania (or the simulation of the same) than coherent, progressive socialist thought.

Of course demand must drive production; but then social planning must drive demand, not individual decisions by nuclear families.

Again, "nuclear families" represent your emendation. Individual decisions are individual decisions, not "family" decisions (decisions by the senior straight man in the family). And this, not only does it not follow, it runs completely contrary to what socialist planning is.

Suppose we have a functional:

𝔓(M, l) = d,

where the left hand side is the total production, M represents material inputs and l labour, and d is the demand. Then, the task of socialist planning is to invert this relation, symbolically:

(M, l) = 𝔓-1(d).

That is, given the projected demand d, we try to find out how much materials and labour is going to be needed to produce enough to satisfy that demand (plus some sort of buffer). If, on the other hand, society controls d as well as M and l, the relation becomes trivial. There is no planning here; instead of anarchy of the market we have anarchic production driven by nothing in particular.

What you propose, when you talk of a "planned economy", and of a "scientific plan", is planned capitalism; that is the reason that capitalism is restored: because it was never destroyed first place. Yes, this is a consequence of the failure of international revolution, but the failure of international revolution does not doom the revolution of itself; it does that trough a series of quite material consequences that follow from that failure and impose themselves into the social workings of a "deformed workers State". Otherwise we would be back to what you criticise as "talking about a delicate glass figurine, which must not be upset from its precarious balance, and not a historically stable mode of production". Why wouldn't it follow Khrushchev programme of defeating capitalism through competition, if it is such a stable mode of production - moreover if we think that it can thrive even with a substantial reduction of human population?

Of course socialism is a historically stable mode of production. What else could it be? The problem with Khrushchev's programme, of course, is that socialism in one country is impossible.

Well, I say it's impossible, but I suspect it might work in two scenarios:

(1) if everyone outside the "one country" were dead; or
(2) if everyone outside the "one country" let us come and take resources as necessary for our planned production; moreover they would have to take orders as we are planning our production and need to work with definite numbers for future stock (see (1)).

If this is not the case, then any individual region of the globe can only have a half-planned economy, where the law of planning exists alongside and is limited by the law of value, imposed by the necessity of participating in a global market.

And of course, while socialism will be more efficient than capitalism in material terms - we will get more buckskin for our, um, buck - it will not produce value at all, so it can't compete with capitalism.

This discussion is perhaps too abstract.

Let's pretend that we are members of that "scientific plan" committee.

Let's accept the idea that the level of development of productive forces under modern capitalism in Northern Italy (not Nepal or Uganda) is enough for us to transition easily to communism (ie, as you say, that communism is possible now).

Lamborghini employs some 800 workers to produce some 2,400 cars yearly. It takes three workers labouring a full year, 36 hours a week, to make a Lamborghini.

And why does it take that much time?

Assuming this (http://www.digitaltrends.com/business/lamborghini-factory-tour-pictures-production-process/) is a reliable source, which it seems to be, this is because most of the assembly is done by hand. This might seem odd, even a bit scandalous, particularly in Italy, so famous for its industrial and household robotics, but it makes sense, of course. More than the volume of profit, Automobili Lamborghini SPA needs to keep its rate of profit high. Automation is horrible for the rate of profit, as no profit can be extracted from machines.

Therefore, the first thing that would happen in the transitional society is that the former factories of Lamborghini would be automated as much as is possible. This would obviously cut down on the living labour-time needed to produce each automobile drastically.

ckaihatsu

11th November 2015, 19:03

'AI takes over', 'hand everything over to an AI', or 'merge yourself with the Internet hive-mind'.

I have to add that the unabated 'artificial intelligence' hype roundly conflates 'intelligence' with 'direction', when the two are *not* the same -- intelligence is a *means* to an end, but can't be the end in itself because intelligence is only a *tool* for *consciousness*, or willful direction.

('Intelligence' may be seen as synonymous with 'science' or 'knowledge', as in the 'philosophical abstractions' diagram, below. And 'consciousness' / direction may be seen as forward-going in time, akin to a 'plan', as in the 'universal context' diagram, following.)

philosophical abstractions

http://s6.postimg.org/cw2jljmgh/120404_philosophical_abstractions_RENDER_sc_12_1.j pg (http://postimg.org/image/i7hg698j1/full/)

universal context

http://s6.postimg.org/6fg99lqpd/120407_universal_context_aoi_RENDER_sc_01_png_xc.j pg (http://postimg.org/image/fn8hqaxrh/full/)

LuÃs Henrique

11th November 2015, 22:24

You're twisting and turning and trying to wriggle out of acknowledging that *plenty* of pre-existing luxury goods will inevitably continue to physically exist after the revolution -- while paper 'wealth' will instantly become meaningless, any *tangible* goods will have to be physically / socially dealt with in one way or another. Would they uniformly be left to *rot* -- ? Would they all be proactively *destroyed* -- ? If 'expropriated', how would any such remaining goods be socially distributed -- ?

You've decided to be argumentative for some reason, having already forgotten this part:

My guess is that existing cars will remain personal property, until it becomes clear that having a personal car is lower quality transportation vis-a-vis real good public transportation. And that newly produced cars will be put at the disposal of the public for eventual use. That almost certainly will mean the production will need to be downsized; cars are extremely underused in the conditions of individual ownership.

Hm, read it again:

Those that already exist, and aren't used in the barricades, will remain what they are, I suppose, until they are eventually superceeded by high-quality public transportation. I don't see why they would be expropriated, in principle.

If this isn't clear, let me explain.

The use of automobiles in barricades is quite traditional; a few will probably be destroyed that way. Those that aren't, will remain what they are - ie, will remain personal ownership of their owners. Until they are eventually superceeded by high quality public transportation - because yes, I think really good public transportation systems will render automobiles obsolete. On the other hand, I don't see why they would be expropriated - meaning that I don't think they should be expropriated. In principle, of course, because I am also not opposed to the expropriation of personal property of active counter-revolutionaries that take arms against the DotP.

any *tangible* goods will have to be physically / socially dealt with in one way or another. Would they uniformly be left to *rot* -- ? Would they all be proactively *destroyed* -- ? If 'expropriated', how would any such remaining goods be socially distributed -- ?

I think there is little room for doubt here. Most tangible goods - cars, houses, yachtes, even luxury ones, that are personal property and aren't used as tools to exploit other people's labour, will remain personal property of their owners. Tangible goods that are used to exploit labour will quite certainly be expropriated, to exactly put an end to such use. Neither will be purposefully and systematically destroyed, or left to rot, unless they are for some reason deemed utterly useless and a new use can't be found for them (yes, churches are completely useless, but they can be turned into museums, or stand as attractions themselves if they are sufficiently "artistic").

The social relationships implied in their production and use, however, will have to be actively destroyed, if they are exploitative, excludent, or discriminatory. Meaning that while we won't destroy automobiles, or even automobile plants, we are going to destroy the "automobile culture" that plagues modern cities.

I never claimed that any segment of the population is / would-be 'superfluous'.

Nor did I say or imply that. Quite clearly, what I mean is that people who produce obsolete commodities, in a capitalist society, are superfluous to capital. And that in a communist society, we need to be able to stop the production of any given goods, without harming the livelihood of people who produce them.

Sure, there are no 'unwashed brains', in the sense that everyone exists in some kind of current social paradigm, with all of its pre-existing external influences, but even all of that doesn't negate my own self-awareness and personal sovereignty -- such as it is -- as an individual.

I don't think it does, though I certainly wouldn't use terms like "personal sovereignity". As I said, you are right.

Luís Henrique

LuÃs Henrique

11th November 2015, 22:40

And why does it take that much time?

Assuming this (http://www.digitaltrends.com/business/lamborghini-factory-tour-pictures-production-process/) is a reliable source, which it seems to be, this is because most of the assembly is done by hand.

Ah, so Automobili Lamborghini SPA would need a little industrial revolution of its own, in order to evolve past its present artisan-like mode of production? That would mean that Lamborghini would have to be completely revamped, even to just continue producing luxury cars, wouldn't it? But should we completely revamp a factory, based exclusively in the demand that the products of such factory have of now, under capitalist social relations?

The point is, though, that this is another thing implied by "high quality" in a capitalist society: purposefully expensive, so as to fulfill its role as social hierarchy marker.

This might seem odd, even a bit scandalous, particularly in Italy, so famous for its industrial and household robotics, but it makes sense, of course. More than the volume of profit, Automobili Lamborghini SPA needs to keep its rate of profit high. Automation is horrible for the rate of profit, as no profit can be extracted from machines.

Yes, and yet most capitalist are pushed into automating, automating, and automating, in order to rise the surplus value rate. Lamborghini is able to avoid this because it produces for a niche market, and such market is niche because it is a market for luxuries.

Therefore, the first thing that would happen in the transitional society is that the former factories of Lamborghini would be automated as much as is possible. This would obviously cut down on the living labour-time needed to produce each automobile drastically.

So, what happened to "communism is possible today"?

Come on, it doesn't even make any sence. There are enough highly automated car factories - FIAT, if we stick to Northern Italy, Volkswagen, Ford, GM, Renault, Peugeot, Citroën, Toyota, Hyunday, that can provide the demand for familial wheeled vehicles if we want to keep them.

Luís Henrique

LuÃs Henrique

11th November 2015, 22:52

Not so with socialism. In its heyday, socialism might have promised some immediate reforms to be won before the conquest of power, but at present, in this era of decaying capitalism, the only force capable of wresting reforms from the bourgeoisie is a powerful and militant proletariat - and this in turn requires the militancy to be generalised, to the point where the question of power is posed, or to dissipate, at which point all the reforms won will be withdrawn (as had happened in the seventies and the eighties).

So if socialism is something that happens after we are all dead, and struggling for socialism can't give us any tangible benefits in this world, what's the point? Obviously then the most we can hope for is some sort of unhappy marriage between the "socialism" of the "Socialist" International and the corporatism of the PRI.

Since we do not have, at this moment, a powerful and militant proletariat, it seems to follow that what the struggle for socialism can give us, as a tangible benefit, is exactly the building of a powerful militant proletariat.

With the sham we have nowadays, revolution is a pipe dream.

Luís Henrique

ckaihatsu

11th November 2015, 23:09

Hm, read it again:

If this isn't clear, let me explain.

The use of automobiles in barricades is quite traditional; a few will probably be destroyed that way. Those that aren't, will remain what they are - ie, will remain personal ownership of their owners. Until they are eventually superceeded by high quality public transportation - because yes, I think really good public transportation systems will render automobiles obsolete. On the other hand, I don't see why they would be expropriated - meaning that I don't think they should be expropriated. In principle, of course, because I am also not opposed to the expropriation of personal property of active counter-revolutionaries that take arms against the DotP.

I think there's an outstanding issue here, though -- that of expropriation for political 'punishment' vs. expropriation for human 'need' ('want', really, in the case of luxury items).

Just as we wouldn't link material rewards to (liberated) labor / work-effort performed, for the sake of its inherent commodification (communism is supposed to be production for *need*), we shouldn't be using expropriation as any kind of political-behaviorist *tool* -- rather, we should see 'want' as a blurry-line extension of 'need', and seek to proactively *redistribute* all goods on the basis of human need or want, just as if they happened to be collectively *produced*, under socialism / communism. (And all goods were originally produced by exploited labor, anyway.)

I think there is little room for doubt here. Most tangible goods - cars, houses, yachtes, even luxury ones, that are personal property and aren't used as tools to exploit other people's labour, will remain persona property of their owners.

Isn't this politically *problematic*, though, considering that all such tangible wealth was only possible due to the exploitation of labor -- ? Wouldn't a newly self-liberated liberated labor want to understandably and justifiably collectively 'take back' the very things that their own labor produced in the past -- ?

Tangible goods that are used to exploit labour will quite certainly be expropriated, to exactly put an end to such use.

Agreed, entirely.

Neither will be purposefully and systematically destroyed, or left to rot, unless they are for some reason deemed utterly useless and a new use can't be found for them (yes, churches are completely useless, but they can be turned into museums, or stand as attractions themselves if they are sufficiently "artistic").

Agreed.

I'll introduce a tangential concern, if you'd like to address it -- what of plain, ordinary structures, like nondescript small office buildings -- ? It's entirely possible that no one, post-revolution, would readily want to use them *or* tend to them -- would / should there be some kind of *social policy* made to address such 'weak spots', such as collectively offering some sort of 'incentive' for liberated labor to demolish, refurbish, or transform such structures -- ?

The social relationships implied in their production and use, however, will have to be actively destroyed, if they are exploitative, excludent, or discriminatory. Meaning that while we won't destroy automobiles, or even automobile plants, we are going to destroy the "automobile culture" that plagues modern cities.

I suppose -- though, to be nit-picky, I would tend to think of that kind of thing just 'withering away'.

Nor did I say or imply that. Quite clearly, what I mean is that people who produce obsolete commodities, in a capitalist society, are superfluous to capital. And that in a communist society, we need to be able to stop the production of any given goods, without harming the livelihood of people who produce them.

Certainly.

I don't think it does, though I certainly wouldn't use terms like "personal sovereignity". As I said, you are right.

LuÃs Henrique

12th November 2015, 10:41

Opportunist groups like the Lambertists might not be a mass party (because no one wants to join them), but this does not mean they are independent from the influence of the labour aristocracy and bureaucracy. Quite the contrary. Lambert might have written tomes on "globalisation" and got the approval of Healy and Cannon, but what really kept his group afloat was their close relationship with the Force Ouvriere. Likewise, in the US, the ACFI/WL/SEP of Wohlforth, Mazelis and North was close to the AFL-CIO bureaucracy, who they begged for years to form a labour party on the British model.

Ah, but the Lambertists are certainly not the only cult-opportunist organisation in the world. And cultism-opportunism, like everything else, is very diverse.

True, any opportunist cult, even the most petty-bourgeois and outlandish, must derive their energy from class struggle, and so from actual working class organisations, be them the Force Ouvrière or the KKE. But most of them are merely parasitary regarding the class struggle. They function according to a dynamics of "growth by accretion" insterspersed with sectarian splits. They stand at the margins of class struggle, eventually recruit a few class fighters, who they then drive away from actual class struggle and into their own organisational life (or into "struggle" against other similar groups), and when and if they grow too much for what their organisational model can hold, they split into two or more opportunist cults. Some cults take great care as to not grow, to avoid those crises; others, more delusional, put great energy into growth, recruit too much, and go bang.

Luís Henrique

LuÃs Henrique

12th November 2015, 11:04

I think there's an outstanding issue here, though -- that of expropriation for political 'punishment' vs. expropriation for human 'need' ('want', really, in the case of luxury items).

Just as we wouldn't link material rewards to (liberated) labor / work-effort performed, for the sake of its inherent commodification (communism is supposed to be production for *need*), we shouldn't be using expropriation as any kind of political-behaviorist *tool*

In an actual revolution, I think lots of things will be spontaneously expropriated by the masses (or by opportunists taking advantage of the masses). What we stand for is for the expropriation of means of production; what we will get is probably more than that, and I don't think we should return personal property that has been expropriated during class struggle, except in cases of blatant abuse.

The landlord defends "his" plantation against the peasants at gun point; the peasants overwhelm him and take it forcibly, and while they are at it, they take the landlord's mansion too, and transform it into a collective dwelling. Though thing; I think it should remain expropriated. If however the landlord has a clearer mind, and concedes to the expropriation of the plantation and manages to retain the mansion, I don't think we should send soviet's troops to enforce its expropriation.

Isn't this politically *problematic*, though, considering that all such tangible wealth was only possible due to the exploitation of labor -- ? Wouldn't a newly self-liberated liberated labor want to understandably and justifiably collectively 'take back' the very things that their own labor produced in the past -- ?

I think most goods have a time-limited existence, and can be abundantly produced if we decide to, so I don't think it is necessary to expropriate the limousines of the rich - or the compact cars of the lower middle class/upper working class. They will eventually turn into wreckage anyway, and we can produce more cars for collective use, or - preferably - revamp the public transportation systems so that they are more comfortable and speedy than individual/familial automobiles.

I'll introduce a tangential concern, if you'd like to address it -- what of plain, ordinary structures, like nondescript small office buildings -- ? It's entirely possible that no one, post-revolution, would readily want to use them *or* tend to them -- would / should there be some kind of *social policy* made to address such 'weak spots', such as collectively offering some sort of 'incentive' for liberated labor to demolish, refurbish, or transform such structures -- ?

There is an enormous habitational deficit world wide, and office buildings can probably be transformed into residential buildings without too much effort, at least transitorily.

I suppose -- though, to be nit-picky, I would tend to think of that kind of thing just 'withering away'.

They may perhaps "wither away" if we take the appropriate measures to make them obsolete. But we will have to actively decide to make them obsolete.

Luís Henrique

LuÃs Henrique

12th November 2015, 11:21

There are numerous reasons, none of which have anything to do with racism, why one might prefer to travel alone.

... those being?

If I were to use the same tumblresque rhetoric you use I would accuse you of advocating public transport so that women can get molested. But that would be a punch below the belt; more importantly it would be completely stupid.

Well, when I say "high quality" in relation to public transportation, I certainly mean a public transportation in which women are not molested. If they are molested, then it isn't "high quality" at all.

Besides, obviously racial discrimination is impossible in public transportation. No, wait, I'm a crazy liar, it's more than possible, and it happens even today. I've personally seen bus drivers who would stop and open the doors for a Croat pensioner, but refuse to do the same for a Roma woman. This is not an argument against public transport, of course; it's an argument against the relations of production that engender a virulent anti-Roma racism in Eastern Europe.

This assumes "bus drivers", who, of course, can be racists of all kinds.

But since the point would be automation of public transportation (which is part of making it "high quality"), so that no one has to "be" a "bus driver", I don't think we are talking about the same thing.

Also, why do you imagine black people want to share public transportation with racists? Speaking as a gay man, a situation that is somewhat analogous, the fact that homophobes might not want to share transportation with me is not exactly high on my list of daily complaints. Quite the contrary, if they want to segregate themselves, let them, preferably into the life of the world to come, amen. The problem is not that some sort of socialist authority has not forced us to share public transportation (how?). The problem is that capitalist society is structurally homophobic, due to its reliance on the family. Likewise, capitalist society is structurally racist.

Evidently, a capitalist society is structurally racist and homophobic. And sexist, and exclusionary at large.

Its racism, homophobia, sexism, and exclusivism, however, are implemented into the material apparel of life under capitalism. Why is racism a problem within public transportation? Because people want "high quality transportation", and in a capitalist society this will mean "transportation that does not transport the poor" (and being Black, or Roma, etc., is widely associated with poverty). Those who are well-to-do enough solve this "problem", or fulfill that "demand" by driving their own cars; those who aren't will come with "solutions" like segregated public transportation. And in this moment where political correctness has taken the place of class struggle (and, aparently, of actual reasoning) there certainly will be those who argue for segregation in order to protect the Blacks from racists, the homosexual from the homophobic, and women from bus molesters. Oh wait, the latter is already happening.

Luís Henrique

LuÃs Henrique

12th November 2015, 11:24

And do you see the problem here? You're equating things that are improbable or impossible with something that quite literally already exists.

No. I am saying that some things that you deem possible are actually not possible.

Luís Henrique

ckaihatsu

12th November 2015, 14:13

In an actual revolution, I think lots of things will be spontaneously expropriated by the masses (or by opportunists taking advantage of the masses). What we stand for is for the expropriation of means of production; what we will get is probably more than that, and I don't think we should return personal property that has been expropriated during class struggle, except in cases of blatant abuse.

The landlord defends "his" plantation against the peasants at gun point; the peasants overwhelm him and take it forcibly, and while they are at it, they take the landlord's mansion too, and transform it into a collective dwelling. Though thing; I think it should remain expropriated. If however the landlord has a clearer mind, and concedes to the expropriation of the plantation and manages to retain the mansion, I don't think we should send soviet's troops to enforce its expropriation.

I think most goods have a time-limited existence, and can be abundantly produced if we decide to, so I don't think it is necessary to expropriate the limousines of the rich - or the compact cars of the lower middle class/upper working class. They will eventually turn into wreckage anyway, and we can produce more cars for collective use, or - preferably - revamp the public transportation systems so that they are more comfortable and speedy than individual/familial automobiles.

There is an enormous habitational deficit world wide, and office buildings can probably be transformed into residential buildings without too much effort, at least transitorily.

They may perhaps "wither away" if we take the appropriate measures to make them obsolete. But we will have to actively decide to make them obsolete.

Interesting -- you're more willing to see organizational-logistical efforts dedicated to changing the prevailing culture (anti-car-culture), but not so much when it comes to the redistribution of luxury goods.

We're each simply extrapolating, of course, but I myself would tend to think of a more *organized* proletarian force that would collectively develop social policy and then enforce it, in the revolutionary period. This would include *disarming* any counter-revolutionaries and most likely redistributing all existing goods, including luxury items, as well. Perhaps you happen to see this as a *diversion* and a delay to new, collective production -- ?

Comrade #138672

12th November 2015, 19:19

Should I be ready to ditch my smartphone as a symbol of spectacular alienation?The smartphone itself is not the problem. It is only a tool. A very useful tool.

olahsenor

12th November 2015, 19:29

The fact that the old Soviet Union was ahead of USA in inventing the space satellite only means that in all other aspects, Soviet Union is capable of having been the lead in all kinds of industries. You can read it too in the latest spy non-fiction book, THE ONE BILLION DOLLAR SPY, that without an American mole inside their aircraft industry, the Soviets should have controlled airspace and satellite imagery. Why he was called the 'billion dollar spy' was because the mole was pilfering Soviet aircraft technology for 10 years without having been caught. That speaks for itself.